From Silicon Valley to Ant Financial: He Changhua’s Journey and the Rise of AI‑Driven Real‑Time Big Data Platforms

In spring 2017, 40‑year‑old He Changhua left a successful 12‑year career in Silicon Valley to become chief architect of computing and storage at Ant Financial in Hangzhou, expressing that he now needed his country as much as his country needed him.

During a CCTV interview in December 2017, He, a Stanford‑trained PhD who joined Google from Cisco in 2008 and helped build the next‑generation "Caffeine" search engine, explained his desire to test his limits by working on massive user‑facing services that billions of people rely on daily.

At the ATEC conference at the end of 2017, Ant Financial unveiled its "BASIC" strategy—Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Security, IoT, and Computing—placing AI at the core. Since returning, He has led teams that launched Ant’s real‑time intelligent decision system, created China’s first financial‑grade distributed graph database Geabase, and designed a new data‑technology architecture and core financial compute engine.

One standout achievement is the open‑source machine‑learning tool SQLFlow , which merges sophisticated AI capabilities with simple SQL statements, dramatically lowering the barrier for data engineers to apply AI. Developed by the AI Infra team under He’s leadership, SQLFlow enables users to describe entire data flows and AI models with just a few lines of SQL.

He explains that the goal of SQLFlow is to democratize machine learning so that any business user can invoke AI as easily as writing SQL, a vision echoed by Ant Financial’s vice‑CTO who announced that AI skills will become a basic competency for all technologists over the next three years. Since its open‑source release, SQLFlow has been used in Alipay’s marketing recommendation engine and is slated for deployment in other sectors such as ride‑hailing.

SQLFlow is part of a broader, ambitious project: a fully real‑time big‑data intelligent platform, described as the "Big Data Base"—the foundational chassis that integrates data, computing, and intelligence for the financial industry.

He’s current mission is to build the next‑generation compute engine that delivers ultra‑low latency, high‑speed real‑time processing for massive, complex financial scenarios—a challenge even more demanding than Google’s original Caffeine search engine.

He predicts that within three years, AI will be involved in the majority of computing tasks across Ant Financial, with 80% of financial services leveraging AI, driven by the explosive growth of data and computing power.

He views the convergence of massive user data, AI, and finance as a defining "era scenario" for China’s new rise, emphasizing that the ability to process and apply massive data will shape future societal intelligence.

He also expresses admiration for Elon Musk’s visionary risk‑taking and stresses a sense of responsibility to use technology for the public good, concluding that meaningful work makes any hardship worthwhile.