Ant Group’s quarterly profit plunges 91% amid aggressive AI spending spree

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. La...