# Ant Group

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/ant_group
> Updated: 2026-07-27
> Categories: AI Companies, Chinese AI, Finance AI
> License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), the free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Reuse freely with attribution to "AI Wiki (aiwiki.ai)".

Ant Group Co., Ltd. is a Chinese financial technology company headquartered in Hangzhou. It runs Alipay, one of the world's largest digital payment platforms, and is an affiliate of the e-commerce group [Alibaba](/wiki/alibaba), which owns about a third of its shares (32.65 percent as listed in the 2020 offering prospectus) [1][13]. The business began as the payment service Alibaba built for its online marketplaces in 2004, operated under the name Ant Financial Services Group from 2014, and adopted the name Ant Group in 2020 [1][2].

Late in 2020 the company prepared what would have been the largest initial public offering ever attempted, a simultaneous listing in Shanghai and Hong Kong set to raise about 34.5 billion US dollars and value Ant near 313 billion dollars [1]. Chinese regulators halted the sale two days before trading was due to begin. Over the following three years Ant was rebuilt as a financial holding company under central-bank supervision, founder Jack Ma gave up control, and the company paid a fine of 7.123 billion yuan [1][3].

The crackdown pushed Ant to lean harder on technology, and artificial intelligence has become a central focus of its research and development. Through an open-source group called [inclusionAI](/wiki/inclusionai) it has released a family of [generative AI](/wiki/generative_ai) models under the name Ling, codenamed Bailing internally, including a trillion-parameter model, [Ling-1T](/wiki/ling_1t) [8][10]. It has also built an AI health application, invested in model developers such as [Zhipu AI](/wiki/zhipu_ai), and backed a robotics unit [7][8].

## Origins and corporate history

Alipay launched in 2004 as an escrow-based payment tool for Alibaba's Taobao marketplace, letting buyers and sellers who did not know each other complete transactions with a trusted party holding the money in between [2]. It grew into a general payment platform and, by 2013, had passed PayPal as the largest mobile payment service in the world [2]. By June 2020 Alipay reported more than 1.3 billion users and 80 million merchants, and it held over half of China's third-party payment market [1][2].

Between 2010 and 2011 the ownership of Alipay became a public dispute. To qualify for a payment license the People's Bank of China was introducing for domestic firms, Alipay was moved into a company controlled by Jack Ma [2]. Alibaba's large shareholders at the time, Yahoo and SoftBank, said they had not been properly consulted about the transfer, which was carried out at nominal value. The parties settled the argument in July 2011 [2].

Ant Financial Services Group was formed in October 2014 as the parent for Alipay and Alibaba's other financial businesses [1]. By 2018 it was valued at about 150 billion US dollars, the highest for any financial-technology firm at the time [13]. The company renamed itself Ant Group in July 2020, ahead of its planned share sale [1]. Alibaba does not consolidate Ant into its accounts; it holds roughly a third of the equity and treats it as an affiliate rather than a subsidiary [1][13].

Ant's other businesses include MYbank, an online lender in which it holds about a 30 percent stake and which took part in China's digital yuan (e-CNY) pilots [1]. In 2023 the company grouped its overseas operations into Ant International, a Singapore-based arm that became separately managed after a March 2024 restructuring [6]. Ant International runs Alipay+, which links regional mobile wallets so travelers can pay across borders, the merchant-payments brand Antom, the cross-border business-payments firm WorldFirst (acquired in 2019), and the embedded-finance service Bettr [6].

## The 2020 IPO and the regulatory crackdown

Ant filed in 2020 for a dual listing on Shanghai's STAR Market and the Hong Kong exchange. The offering was set to raise about 34.5 billion US dollars at a valuation near 313 billion dollars, which would have topped the 29.4 billion dollars raised by Saudi Aramco and stood as the largest IPO to that date [1].

In late October 2020, less than two weeks before the planned listing, Ma criticized Chinese financial regulators at a Shanghai conference. He said the big state banks operated with a pawnshop mentality and dismissed global banking rules as "a club for the elderly" [3]. On 3 November 2020 the Shanghai Stock Exchange suspended the IPO, and the Hong Kong portion was pulled the same day [1][3].

A forced overhaul followed. In April 2021 it was confirmed that Ant would be turned into a financial holding company supervised by the People's Bank of China, which brought it under bank-style capital requirements [1]. Ant's consumer-credit products, the Huabei virtual credit card and the Jiebei small-loan service, were separated from Alipay's other offerings and folded into a licensed consumer-finance company, Chongqing Ant Consumer Finance, approved in June 2021 [1].

In January 2023 Ant announced changes to its share structure that ended Ma's control. His voting rights fell from more than 50 percent to about 6 percent, and the company said no single shareholder held a controlling stake [1][3]. On 7 July 2023 China's central bank and other regulators fined Ant 7.123 billion yuan (about 985 million US dollars) for breaches of rules on corporate governance, payment and settlement, consumer protection, and anti-money-laundering [1]. The penalty was widely read as the close of the active phase of the crackdown.

## The MoneyGram acquisition and CFIUS

Ant's largest attempt to expand in the United States failed on national-security grounds. In January 2017 Ant Financial agreed to buy the American money-transfer company MoneyGram for about 880 million US dollars [4]. It later raised its offer to 18.00 dollars per share to stay ahead of a rival bid [5]. The purchase needed clearance from the [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States](/wiki/cfius) (CFIUS), which reviews foreign acquisitions of US firms for security risk and can recommend that the President block them.

CFIUS declined to approve the transaction. On 2 January 2018 MoneyGram and Ant Financial said they were ending the agreement because they could not obtain the committee's clearance despite extensive efforts to address its concerns, and Ant paid MoneyGram a 30 million dollar termination fee [5]. The block was one of several Chinese acquisitions CFIUS stopped in that period, and it came before the wider tightening of US controls on Chinese technology and investment.

## Artificial intelligence

### The Bailing program and inclusionAI

In 2023 Ant reported record technology research and development spending of 21.19 billion yuan (about 2.9 billion US dollars) [1]. Its [foundation model](/wiki/foundation_models) program is known internally as Bailing (百灵) [1]. Much of the resulting work is published through inclusionAI, described as the home of Ant Group's artificial general intelligence effort, which releases models openly on Hugging Face rather than only inside Alipay [8].

### Open models: Ling, Ming, and Ring

In March 2025 the Ling team published a paper on two [mixture-of-experts](/wiki/mixture_of_experts) [large language models](/wiki/large_language_model): Ling-Lite, with 16.8 billion total parameters and 2.75 billion active per token, and Ling-Plus, with 290 billion total and 28.8 billion active [9]. The paper's main claim was practical rather than about accuracy. It reported that a 300-billion-parameter model could be trained on lower-performance hardware at roughly 20 percent lower cost than on premium accelerators, while reaching comparable quality [9]. The result drew attention because US export controls limit Chinese access to the fastest AI chips, which pushes developers such as Ant, [DeepSeek](/wiki/deepseek), [Baidu](/wiki/baidu), and Alibaba's [Qwen](/wiki/qwen) team toward efficiency techniques and domestic silicon from suppliers like [Huawei](/wiki/huawei).

inclusionAI expanded the line through 2025. Ling-1T, released in October 2025, is a one-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model that activates about 50 billion parameters per token. It was trained on more than 20 trillion tokens, supports a 128,000-token context window, and, according to inclusionAI, is the largest known foundation model trained in FP8 precision; the weights carry an MIT license [10]. Ming-lite-omni, from May 2025, is a [multimodal model](/wiki/multimodal_model) built on the same architecture. It reads text, images, audio, and video and can produce text, speech, and images, using 19 billion total parameters with 2.8 billion active [11]. Ring-1T, also from October 2025, is a reasoning model built on the Ling-1T base and tuned with [reinforcement learning](/wiki/reinforcement_learning) for step-by-step problem solving. Its model card reports competitive scores on 2025 mathematics and programming contests, positioning the model for agentic and reasoning workloads alongside the general-purpose Ling line [12].

### Applications, investments, and robotics

Ant has moved its models into consumer products. In June 2025 it launched a standalone AI health assistant called AQ, built on its medical models to connect users with hospitals and doctors; the company said the app reached about 100 million users within its first weeks [1]. Ant International applies AI to payments through a fraud-detection system it calls AI SHIELD, and has worked with Barclays on models for foreign-exchange forecasting and treasury management [6].

The company is also an investor in the wider [Chinese AI](/wiki/china_ai) sector. In 2023 it joined Alibaba, [Tencent](/wiki/tencent), Meituan, Xiaomi, and the venture firm HongShan in a funding round for Zhipu AI, one of the country's leading large-model startups, reported at about 2.5 billion yuan [7]. Beyond software, Ant backs [Robbyant](/wiki/robbyant_ant_group), a separate unit developing a foundational platform for embodied AI and robotics [8].

## See also

- [Alibaba](/wiki/alibaba)
- [Zhipu AI](/wiki/zhipu_ai)
- [inclusionAI](/wiki/inclusionai)
- [Ling-1T](/wiki/ling_1t)
- [Robbyant](/wiki/robbyant_ant_group)
- [CFIUS](/wiki/cfius)

## References

1. "Ant Group." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_Group
2. "Alipay." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alipay
3. "Jack Ma." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma
4. "MoneyGram." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoneyGram
5. "MoneyGram and Ant Financial Announce Termination of Amended Merger Agreement." PR Newswire, 2 January 2018. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/moneygram-and-ant-financial-announce-termination-of-amended-merger-agreement-300576618.html
6. "Ant International." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_International
7. "Zhipu AI." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhipu_AI
8. inclusionAI. Hugging Face organization page. https://huggingface.co/inclusionAI
9. Ling Team (inclusionAI), "Every FLOP Counts: Scaling a 300B Mixture-of-Experts Ling LLM without Premium GPUs." arXiv:2503.05139, March 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05139
10. inclusionAI, "Ling-1T." Hugging Face model card, October 2025. https://huggingface.co/inclusionAI/Ling-1T
11. inclusionAI, "Ming-lite-omni." Hugging Face model card, May 2025. https://huggingface.co/inclusionAI/Ming-lite-omni
12. inclusionAI, "Ring-1T." Hugging Face model card, October 2025. https://huggingface.co/inclusionAI/Ring-1T
13. "Alibaba Group." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Group