Ant Group

Ant Lingbo, Ant Group's embodied AI unit, signed an MOU with the Arab Federation for Digital Economy at a China-Arab matchmaking session during the fifth Global Digital Trade Expo. The partners will establish a standing cooperation mechanism to deploy embodied AI and full-stack robot solutions in the UAE, GCC and wider Middle East, covering hospitality, retail, logistics, industrial operations, smart city and healthcare, with Arabic-language localization and ecosystem collaboration. Contract value, unit volume and deployment timeline were not disclosed.

At the 2026 Inclusion·Bund Conference, Zhu Xing, CEO of Ant Group’s embodied AI startup Ant Lingbo, said the company has begun its first independent fundraising round with a target of RMB 1.5B (about $214M). The raise is not for lack of money or computing cards, he said, but to improve incentives for existing and future senior talent and strengthen governance as an independent company. Ant Lingbo aims to close a second round by the end of the year, an unusually fast pace for an embodied AI startup.

At the 2026 Inclusion Bund Conference in Shanghai on September 9, Moffett AI (墨芯人工智能), an Ant Group ecosystem partner, showed its AI compute cards built around dedicated sparse inference chips. The company says inference clusters using its chips are already deployed in data centers across Northwest, Southwest, East and North China, serving smart manufacturing, life sciences and urban governance. It also previewed a next-generation SparsePrime® compute card with upgraded architecture and scheduling, without giving a launch date or specifications. Moffett AI joined the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's AI standardization technical committee in July and in August set up a sparse computing industry-academia-research alliance.