HANGZHOU, China--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ant Group's 2025 Sustainability Report disclosed a record R&D investment of USD 5.17 billion (RMB 35.03 billion) in 2025—the fifth straight year of growth—alongside AI-powered green computing breakthroughs that contributed to cutting operational carbon emissions by 55.32% year-on-year. These milestones reflect Ant Group's commitment to sustainable AI development.
“Does technological advancement necessarily lead to shared prosperity? The answer lies not in the technology itself, but in the people who use it,” wrote Eric Jing, Chairman of Ant Group, and Cyril Han, CEO of Ant Group in their joint address. “Making AI a driver for shared prosperity—this is our answer to the age of AI, and our shared commitment to the future."
Record AI Investment Drives Three Core Priorities
According to Ant Group’s 2023 and 2025 Sustainability Reports, the company has been increasing annual R&D spending since 2021. These investments cover major areas including foundational AI models, AI-powered payment & everyday services, and AI-driven health solutions.
AI Health App Bridging the Medical Resource Gap
As of February 2026, Ant Group's AI-native health app, AQ, has reached a major milestone — surpassing 100 million total users. This achievement builds on AQ’s rapidly expanding health ecosystem. By late 2025, the app had connected users with services of over 5,000 medical institutions across China, successfully driving the AI integration of 301 partner facilities.
To enhance accessible care, AQ collaborated with more than 2,000 Chinese physicians to launch “AI Doctor Agents.” These AI-powered virtual doctors are trained on the specific clinical expertise of individual specialists. The doctor agents offer free, reliable guidance for daily health questions, having served over 6.9 million users in 2025.
Next Generation AI Payment and Everyday Services
On June 16, 2026, Alipay launched a major AI agent upgrade ("Ah Bao" in Mandarin), enabling its one billion users to find services more easily and execute daily tasks with the help of its AI agent interface.
In May 2026, Alipay unveiled a full-stack AI payment infrastructure featuring consumer products AI Pay and AI Wallet, alongside business solutions including AI payment processing and Token Pay. At its foundation lies China's first Agentic Commerce Trust Protocol, developed with partners, supported by an intelligent security system that safeguards every AI-driven transaction. Together, these technologies form the trust and transaction infrastructure essential for scaling the agentic economy.
By May 2026, Alipay AI Pay surpassed 300 million transactions, establishing itself as the first commercially scaled AI-native payment infrastructure globally.
As agentic commerce gains momentum in China, Alipay’s AI payment services have expanded across diverse use cases. These include AI agents integrated into apps and mini programs for retailers like Luckin Coffee; AI-powered smart glasses from Rokid; consumer applications such as Alibaba’s Qwen; smart cockpit systems; OpenClaw-type AI agents, and AI development platforms including Coze and Qoder; AI model companies like MiniMax and Stepfun; and One Person Companies (OPCs).
Advancements in Foundation Model Research
In 2025, Ant Group open-sourced the Ling series foundational models, delivering high-performance models at lower computing costs. Its latest evolution features the release of Ling-2.6-1T, a trillion-parameter language model designed for complex, real-world tasks such as coding and multi-step workflows.
Moreover, Robbyant, Ant Group’s embodied AI company, launched the “Evolution of Embodied AI Week” initiative in January 2026 and open-sourced a full stack of AI models for the physical world. Among them is LingBot-World, a world model that achieves industry-leading performance in video quality, dynamic fidelity, long-term consistency, and interactivity.
Green Computing Breakthrough Delivers Measurable Impact
Following the principle of “achieving the same business outcomes with less computing power”, Ant Group's self-developed Theta AI infrastructure enables substantial efficiency gains through optimized model distribution and intelligent scheduling:
- Increased GPU utilization during inference 2.3 times
- Cut data center carbon emissions by 139,545 tCO2e
Clean Energy Transition Accelerates
In 2025, Ant Group achieved operational carbon neutrality for the fifth consecutive year, with Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions cut by 55.32% compared with the baseline year of 2020. Through refined clean energy trading and allocation strategies, Ant Group increased clean energy use in its data centers to 65% in 2025.
"We believe that the true value of technology lies not in fleeting trends, but in genuine needs, steadfast commitment, and human well-being. How can technology reach everyone who truly needs it? With unwavering resilience, we will continue to use technology to bring small and beautiful changes to the world,” wrote Sabrina Peng, Chief Sustainability Officer of Ant Group.
Ant Group's 2025 Sustainability Report is available in Chinese here, an English version will be available in the coming months.
About Ant Group
Ant Group is a global digital technology provider and the operator of Alipay, a leading internet services platform in China, connecting over one billion users to more than 10,000 types of consumer services from partners. Through innovative products and solutions powered by AI, blockchain and other technologies, Ant Group supports partners across industries to thrive through digital transformation in an ecosystem for inclusive and sustainable development. For more information, visit www.antgroup.com
Contacts
Media Contact:
Chloe Wang
Ant Group
Email: chloe.wzx@antgroup.com
Ant Group has been ramping up R&D investment in AI
Progress of Ant Group's main AI initiatives |
