Ant Group Withdrawing From $100 Million Crypto Fund A&T Capital

Ant Group is reportedly preparing to wind back its investments in the cryptocurrency sector.

The Chinese tech giant is unwinding its $100 million investment in venture firm A&T Capital, Bloomberg News reported Monday (Sept. 18), citing sources familiar with the matter.

According to the report, the move follows the resignation of A&T founding partner and former Ant executive Yu Jun, who left amid an in-house investigation into his workplace behavior. Sources tell Bloomberg it’s not clear whether A&T will remain in operation. 

A&T could not be reached for comment Monday. PYMNTS has contacted Ant Group for comment but has not yet received a reply.

The Bloomberg report noted that the pull back is happening at a time when crypto venture funding is at its lowest level in three years, amid last year’s crypto winter and a boom in investor interest in artificial intelligence (AI).

Ant Group is among those investors. Earlier this month, the company debuted a financial large language model (LLM) in China and two applications that it powers.

The financial LLM is a specialized language model that has been fine-tuned for AI applications in the financial services industry.

“It surpasses general-purpose LLMs in several key areas, including cognition, generation, domain knowledge, professional thinking and compliance,” PYMNTS wrote. “Ant Group’s in-house benchmark, Fin-Eval, has confirmed the performance of the LLM across various financial-specific tasks.”

Ant Group said it wants to leverage the power of its financial LLM across all digital financial services in partnership with Chinese market institutions and is also working to promote industrial innovation by open-sourcing its AI-powered coding platform, CodeFuse. 

Meanwhile, last month saw a report from J.P. Morgan Chase that crypto miners had begun repurposing computing infrastructure to meet the demand for AI.

“With the rapid growth of AI, the increased demand for high-performance computing is now opening a new and perhaps more profitable avenue for utilizing GPUs [graphics processing units] previously used for ether mining,” J.P. Morgan analysts said in the report.