Ant Group’s Quiet Return: AI, Alipay+ and the Road Back to a Hong Kong IPO

After restructuring, Ant Group reinvents itself around AI and Alipay+

Ant Group, the owner of China’s ubiquitous super app Alipay, claims its name stems from the founding team’s belief that “small is beautiful”, but the Hangzhou-headquartered company is anything but diminutive. Originally the digital payments subsidiary of tech giant Alibaba when it was established in 2004, Ant’s massive scale at home and now increasingly abroad is prompting talk that it has stepped out of the shadow of its parent to become one of China’s tech leaders in its own right.

Ant’s comeback after regulators torpedoed its would-be record-breaking initial public offering (IPO) has been years in the making. The government launched a sudden investigation into the financial technology company in 2020, and regulators squashed its blockbuster dual listing in Shanghai and Hong Kong—which would have valued Ant at $313 billion—and later fined the company and Tencent, operator of China’s other super app, WeChat, billions of dollars.

Several years later, Ant is stronger than ever. Already China’s biggest fintech company, Ant has emerged as a global player by weaving artificial intelligence (AI) into its core products across finance, healthcare and consumer services, while its cross-border payments infrastructure Alipay+ covers nearly one-quarter of humanity.

Neither does Ant intend to tap the brakes. Its global arm Ant International, spun off in 2024 as an independent entity, raised early-stage financing of $1.2 billion in July from investors including its former parent and Alibaba—a prelude to a potential IPO in Hong Kong later this year that could value it above $10 billion.

“Growth has been redirected into areas the state endorses: AI, healthcare, small-business services, and payments infrastructure abroad. Consumer leverage made Ant big the first time; state-aligned technology is the bet for the second,” says Zennon Kapron, director of global fintech consulting firm GL Insight.

The 2020 IPO Collapse and What Broke Ant

Ant—which was carved out from Jack Ma-founded Alibaba in controversial circumstances 15 years ago—is the biggest player in a fintech space that has seen explosive growth since the early 2010s. The expansion is best illustrated through mobile and digital payments—in 2010, when Alipay was carved out of Alibaba, mobile payments barely registered on the radar. Fifteen years later, Chinese smartphone users made 231 billion mobile payments worth ¥572 billion ($84 billion) in 2025.

Ant expanded aggressively beyond handling digital payments for its e-commerce parent into new business lines such as wealth management, lending, insurance and consumer finance—and it was the latter that drew regulatory scrutiny in the run-up to the botched listing of 2020.

At the time, Ant offered loans instantly using analytics tools that assessed an applicant’s creditworthiness, but did not supply the credit or make the loans itself—merely qualifying the borrowers, originating the loans and then handing them off to more than 100 partner banks that actually carried the liability. The moral hazard implicit in Ant’s old loan facilitation model brought the hammer down.

Authorities forced Ant into a restructuring that turned it into a financial holding company, behaving more like a bank with all the associated provisos such as tougher regulatory oversight and minimum capital requirements. Ma, who indirectly held more than half of Ant’s shares, ceded control as his stake was pared down to just 6.2%, although Alibaba continues to own one-third.

Finally, in July 2023, the government fined Ant ¥7.12 billion for its violations while Tencent and its payments subsidiary Tenpay received a ¥2.99 billion fine. The penalties signaled an end to the near three-year regulatory crackdown on China’s tech sector.

“The IPO was a lost opportunity for shareholder value, and resulting from it was the dismantling of the flywheel—the seamless loop between payments, consumer lending, and wealth management that let Ant originate credit at tech-company margins with bank-sized reach,” says Ivy Yang, founder of New York-based consultancy Wavelet Strategy and a former public relations advisor at Ant.

Ant lost roughly three-quarters of its valuation, from an estimated $280 billion before its canceled listing to around $79 billion based on the price offered in a share buyback in 2023. The restructuring hit the growth engine hardest—Huabei and Jiebei, the lending products that drove the IPO story, were folded into a capitalized consumer finance subsidiary—while Ant itself came under the Chinese central bank’s supervision.

“What survived was the asset that mattered most: Alipay and its billion-plus users, the base Ant has been rebuilding on since,” says Kapron. The fallout also taught Ant that regulatory alignment comes before scale in China as the pre-IPO Ant grew by moving faster than the rules; everything since then has moved with them.

Ant’s AI Bet: Ling Models, Ah Bao and Agentar 2.0

Like the rest of its tech peers, Ant is staking its future on AI as it seeks to reinvent itself as a tech company rather than a fintech platform. Its major apps, from Alipay to personalized healthcare chatbot Afu, are suffused with AI. The latter in particular has enjoyed rapid growth since launching in June 2025—within six months it was answering more than 5 million questions every day from 15 million monthly active users, and by February 2026 it had more than 100 million total users.

Like its tech peers at home and abroad, Ant is spending lavishly to build its AI technology. It invested ¥35.03 billion on AI research and development last year, up from ¥23.45 billion in 2024 and ¥21.19 billion in 2023. The intense capital spending is having a discernible impact on Ant’s balance sheet as its profit contribution to Alibaba in the first quarter of 2026 plunged by 79% to ¥375 million, which was attributed to “increased investments in new growth initiatives, including user growth, and technologies”.

“Alipay’s payments and finance businesses still pay for all of it, though. Ant is a fintech platform using its distribution to become an AI company,” says Kapron.

The multibillion-yuan spending has paid for a family of cutting-edge, trillion-parameter open-source AI models known as Ling. Ant has said its frontier Ling models are built for coding agents, long context and enterprise AI workflows, which dovetail with the company’s desire to target corporate customers.

But Ant’s AI strategy is more nuanced than simply spending huge sums. When it comes to models, Ant cannot win on sheer investment—Alibaba’s own model Qwen is previewing a 2.4-trillion-parameter flagship, while Moonshot’s Kimi K3 has claimed parity with leading-edge systems in the US and Zhipu’s GLM-5 leads open-weight benchmarks.

“Ant’s AI bet lies not in beating Qwen or Kimi on benchmarks but in owning the moment when AI touches a transaction,” says Yang. “And for a company whose financial-services growth is capped by regulation, AI is not optional. It is the only unconstrained growth narrative Ant has.”

Ant’s bet on more user engagement with AI—as seen by the craze over OpenClaw in the spring—has led it to embrace agentic AI. Hot on the heels of the OpenClaw frenzy, Ant International open-sourced a protocol for AI agents on mobile devices, allowing virtual assistants to initiate, authenticate, and settle a payment inside a digital wallet or super app on smartphones, wearables, or even cars.

This was followed by the biggest overhaul in Alipay’s history in mid-June, when Ant rolled out a major redesign centered on an AI agent named Ah Bao. Users can ask the agent to perform 10,000 functions, from booking rides and ordering coffee to arranging a delivery or buying a mutual fund.

This level of agentic commerce is on the radar of other key processors like Tencent, Visa and Mastercard, but Ant’s implementation stands out as it leverages an AI wallet and token pay system to let users authorize transactions executed autonomously by agents.

“While competitors build agents that talk, Ant is building agents that transact,” says Yang. “The differentiator is the ecosystem—a billion-user super-app, some 80 million merchants, licensed financial infrastructure, and two decades of risk-control data, which is exactly the trust layer that agentic commerce requires.”

Enterprise tools are where the potential profit is clearest. It was among several domestic tech giants that debuted enterprise AI agent platforms at the World AI Conference in Shanghai in July. Billed as a “commercial AI agent super factory”, Ant’s Agentar 2.0 platform comes with 200 premade ‘digital expert templates’ and hundreds of ready-made agent tools to allow a company to deploy an autonomous AI worker without coding one from scratch.

From Ant hill to mountain

In tandem with Ant’s pivot toward new technologies is an embrace of new markets following the end of its regulator-imposed restructuring. The global expansion has been spearheaded by Alipay+, a platform that is barely six years old but has quietly become the largest cross-border wallet network in the world.

It links more than 50 digital wallets and banking apps and over 10 national QR code systems across Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, to allow a consumer to ‘pay like a local’ across borders without a credit or debit card ever entering the picture.

“Asia’s payments future is wallet-to-wallet and QR code-based, and Alipay+ is the interoperability layer stitching those national systems together, playing the role that card networks play in the West,” says Kapron. It is also the anchor asset for Ant International’s planned Hong Kong listing—if that IPO lands, Alipay+ will have carried Ant back to public markets six years after Beijing shut the door.

What makes Alipay+ so formidable is the scale of the individual partners that Ant International has onboarded, including some of Asia’s key e-wallet brands, from GCash in the Philippines to Malaysia’s Touch ‘n Go, DANA from Indonesia, and India’s Paytm.

Ant’s ability to unify a patchwork of wallets has enabled widespread international use of what were previously domestic-only products. Alipay+ now serves 2 billion user accounts across the dozens of supported wallets and apps, allowing them to seamlessly pay 150 million merchants worldwide. And in July, Argentina became the latest country and first in South America to add its national QR payment system to Alipay+.

Ant’s advantages

Ant’s edge over Tencent-operated WeChat and other major tech powerhouses comes down to focus and data. The company boasts a unique combination of unrivalled expertise in marrying financial services and digital platforms, granular organic transaction data from a billion customers, and a robust track record of injecting new tech such as AI into its business streams. Beyond payments and AI, Ant also owns OceanBase, one of China’s leading open-source database engines, and MYbank, one of the country’s largest online-only lenders — a stack that few peers can match end-to-end.

“Payments and finance are a side business inside WeChat, but for Ant they are the entire company, and the depth shows in financial AI trained on two decades of transaction and credit data.” Says Kapron.

“Distribution is the second edge: when Ant launches an AI product, Alipay can put it in front of a mass audience within weeks, as the AQ health app showed. The third is under-appreciated: Ant has learned to train frontier-scale open-source models on domestic chips, which matters under US export controls,” he says, adding, “Tencent has the bigger social graph; Ant has the deeper financial stack.”

Beijing calls the shots

Ant’s biggest constraint is the one it has lived under since 2020, namely a regulatory hangover that permits Beijing to set the perimeter of its business. This legacy reared its head in October 2025 when Ant was preparing to apply for a stablecoin licence in Hong Kong until a directive from Beijing in October 2025 stopped the work within days. When the first licences were granted this spring, Ant was absent—a warning that it still does not have a free hand and that compliance could eventually constrain innovation.

“The company that once tested regulators’ boundaries now moves only where the boundaries have already been drawn,” says Yang. “The result is a company Beijing can read at a glance—and a ceiling set in Beijing, not in the market.”

For all of Ant’s heft, money remains another constraint as AI spending is running well ahead of AI revenue and it remains to be seen if open-source models like Ling can be monetized at scale. Geopolitics caps the map too as Western markets remain effectively closed, so growth runs through Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.

Ant on the march

Ant has been more than an anchor in China’s payments ecosystem for the past decade—it is the infrastructure that makes consumer and business transactions go around. As far as payments go, Ant’s mastery and ownership of the digital rails that our transactions ride on makes it load-bearing for China’s digital economy in a way that virtually no other company can match.

But Ant cannot be said to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent as a capital-markets and AI peer just yet. For one thing, the public market question has not disappeared. The company has trod softly when it comes to a revival of its aborted IPO—perhaps fearful of the political sensitivity, it scotched rumors in December 2024 that a backdoor listing was imminent. The company is clearly testing the waters with Ant International’s potential Hong Kong listing, however, which if successful would be the first public-market verdict on Ant since 2020.

It would be unwise to bet against Ant eventually taking a seat at the top table. If and when it does, it will be as a different kind of company than the one that almost listed six years ago, an infrastructure-and-applied-AI company rather than a fintech player. “The 2020 IPO proved Beijing can unmake a giant. The next five years will show whether it is willing to let one be remade,” says Yang.