Via blog.mondato.com
The Alibaba-affiliated fintech giant is pouring billions into AI healthcare and language models, and its bottom line is feeling the squeeze.
Ant Group, the fintech behemoth behind Alipay, is learning an expensive lesson that every tech company eventually confronts: betting big on the future costs a lot in the present. The company’s quarterly profit has dropped dramatically as it funnels resources into artificial intelligence across healthcare, large language models, and payment services.
For the quarter ending September 30, Ant’s profit fell roughly 91% year-over-year to approximately 1.2 billion yuan, or about $57 million. For a company that once tried to pull off what would have been the world’s largest IPO, that’s a humbling number.
The AI money pit #
Ant’s R&D spending reached 23.45 billion yuan in 2024, a 10.7% jump from the prior year’s 21.19 billion yuan. That increase is almost entirely directed toward AI capabilities, spanning healthcare applications, large language models, and smarter payment tools within its Alipay ecosystem.
The following quarter ending December 31 didn’t offer much relief either, with profits estimated to have declined about 79% to somewhere around 1.13 to 1.15 billion yuan.
Where the money is going #
The most visible product of Ant’s AI push is AQ, its AI-powered healthcare application. Launched in June 2025, the app crossed 100 million users by July 2025.
Meanwhile, Ant’s AI Pay features within the Alipay platform have also surpassed the 100 million-user mark.
The regulatory shadow #
All of this is happening against a backdrop that would make most companies hesitant to spend freely. Ant has been operating under intense regulatory scrutiny since Chinese authorities halted its blockbuster IPO in late 2020, just days before shares were set to begin trading.
Since then, the company has undergone a significant restructuring, accepted regulatory fines, and largely stayed out of the headlines. The fact that Ant doesn’t publicly disclose its own earnings, with financial details instead surfacing through Alibaba Group’s roughly one-third ownership stake, adds another layer of opacity.
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