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JD.com, Inc. (Chinese: 京东; pinyin: Jīngdōng), formerly known as 360buy, is a Chinese e-commerce, retail, and technology company headquartered in Beijing. Founded by Liu Qiangdong (also known in English as Richard Liu) on 18 June 1998, the company began as an offline magneto-optical electronics retailer before pivoting to online sales in 2004. Today, JD.com is one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world by revenue, with reported net revenues of RMB 1,158.8 billion (about US$158.8 billion) for the full year of 2024 and an ecosystem of roughly 900,000 employees, contractors, and affiliated personnel as of mid-2025. [1][2]
While widely recognized as a direct competitor to Alibaba in Chinese e-commerce, JD has also emerged as one of the country's most aggressive corporate adopters of artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous driving. The company operates fully automated "Asia No. 1" warehouses, maintains one of the world's earliest commercial drone-delivery programs, runs a 100-billion-parameter large language model called ChatRhino (Chinese: Yanxi, 言犀), and in 2025 committed more than RMB 10 billion to an Intelligent Robot Industry Acceleration Plan that includes investments in humanoid-robot startups such as LimX Dynamics, Spirit AI, and EngineAI. [3][4][5][6]
JD.com was founded in 1998 by Liu Qiangdong as an offline retailer of magneto-optical products and small consumer electronics, operating under the brand Jingdong (a name derived from a combination of Liu's then-girlfriend Gong Xiaojing's given name and his own). By 2003 the company operated 12 brick-and-mortar stores in Beijing, but the SARS outbreak that year forced staff and customers to stay home, prompting Liu to shift the business online in 2004. The company adopted the domain 360buy.com in 2007 and rebranded as JD.com in 2013. [7][8]
In May 2014, JD.com listed on the NASDAQ in New York, raising about US$1.78 billion in what was at the time the largest U.S. listing by a Chinese internet company. Earlier that year, Tencent had purchased a roughly 15 percent stake in JD and folded its struggling B2C and C2C marketplaces (QQ Wanggou and Paipai) into the company, granting JD prominent placement inside the WeChat super-app. In 2016, Walmart acquired its initial stake in JD by selling its Chinese e-commerce subsidiary Yihaodian to JD in exchange for equity, eventually growing its position to roughly 12 percent before exiting in August 2024. In 2018, Google made a US$550 million strategic investment in JD as part of a broader cooperation agreement. [7][9][10][11]
JD operates three publicly listed businesses and several wholly-owned units:
Unlike marketplace-only competitors, JD operates an end-to-end self-built model in which it directly purchases inventory, stores it in regional fulfillment centers, and delivers most orders with its own fleet. That vertical integration is the foundation for the company's heavy investment in warehouse and last-mile automation.
JD has been investing in AI research and infrastructure since at least 2017, when it formally established the JD AI Research Institute with a remit covering computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning, and speech recognition. The institute has historically partnered with universities (including a long-running joint laboratory with Stanford University, the SAIL-JD AI Research Initiative; the HKUST-JD.com Joint Laboratory at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; and a CUHK-Shenzhen joint AI lab) and operates dedicated robotics work through the JD-X Robotics Research Center in Silicon Valley, which develops autonomous ground vehicles, delivery drones, and warehouse robotic systems. [13][14][15]
Liu Qiangdong has framed AI and supply-chain technology as the company's central long-term moat, contrasting JD's vertically integrated model with the platform-only approach favored by Alibaba Cloud and Pinduoduo. In a 2025 strategy update, the company said that its goal is to reconstruct the entire "super supply chain" with AI agents, claiming that more than 30,000 intelligent agents and digital humans served roughly 40,000 merchants during the 2025 Singles' Day promotion alone, while AI customer service handled more than 4.2 billion inquiries during the same event. [16][17]
The table below summarizes JD's main publicly announced AI products and the year they were introduced. (Years reflect public launch or upgrade announcements; many products went through earlier internal pilots.)
| Year | Product or initiative | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | JD AI Research Institute | Central R&D unit covering computer vision, NLP, machine learning, and speech recognition |
| 2017 | NeuHub open AI platform | Public APIs for NLP, speech, vision, and machine learning aimed at enterprise developers |
| 2018 | JD-X Robotics Research Center (Silicon Valley) | U.S.-based lab focused on autonomous delivery, drones, and warehouse robots |
| 2020 | Yanxi (言犀) smart customer service | AI customer-service platform that, by 2024, served more than 580 million end users across retail, finance, and government |
| 2023 | ChatJD / Vega LLM | First-generation 10-billion-parameter LLM tied to JD Cloud, trained on retail and supply-chain data |
| 2023 | ChatRhino (Yanxi LLM) | 100-billion-parameter multimodal LLM combining roughly 70 percent general data with 30 percent intelligent supply-chain data |
| 2023 | Jingyi Qianxun (京医千询) | Medical LLM operated by JD Health for online and in-hospital healthcare scenarios |
| 2023 | JoyBuild LLM platform | Model-as-a-service platform for fine-tuning ChatRhino and third-party models |
| 2024 | Yanxi digital human / Procurement & Sales Manager Brother Dong | AI digital twin of founder Richard Liu used in livestreaming; debuted with 20 million views in one hour |
| 2024 | JoyStreamer / JoyGen | AIGC livestreaming presenter and short-video generation tools for merchants |
| 2025 | AI Hospital 1.0 (AI Jingyi suite) | Virtual hospital with AI general practitioners, pharmacists, and digital twins of real doctors |
| 2025 | JoyInside | Onboard AI conversation stack offered to robotics partners under the Intelligent Robot Industry Acceleration Plan |
JD.com unveiled the ChatRhino (Yanxi) large language model on 13 July 2023 at its annual JDDiscovery technology summit. The base model has roughly 100 billion parameters and was trained on a corpus that JD describes as approximately 70 percent general internet data and 30 percent native supply-chain data drawn from product listings, after-sales conversations, logistics records, and warehouse operations data. ChatRhino supports text, voice, vision, and multimodal interactions and is positioned as an industry-grade LLM rather than a general consumer chatbot. [3][4][18]
At the same summit, JD also released supporting infrastructure including the ChatRhino AI Developing and Computing Platform (a model-as-a-service layer marketed as JoyBuild), the Vearch vector database, the Cloud Ship hybrid multi-cloud operating system, the Cloud Ocean high-performance storage platform, and the Jing Gang integrated virtualization engine. ChatRhino superseded JD's earlier 10-billion-parameter Vega model, which had been quietly piloted under the project name ChatJD. [4][18][19]
ChatRhino is deployed under several brand variants targeted at specific verticals:
In April 2024, JD debuted an AI digital human modeled on founder Richard Liu, branded internally as "Procurement and Sales Manager Brother Dong" (采销东哥). The avatar appeared in JD Home Appliances and JD Supermarket livestreams, drawing more than 20 million viewers in its first hour and generating roughly RMB 50 million in sales over the full session. The system reproduces Liu's facial expressions, gestures, and voice and is built on the ChatRhino multimodal stack. JD has since rolled out the digital-human capability to more than 13,000 brands, with JD Cloud reporting that off-peak conversion rates rose by more than 30 percent thanks to round-the-clock virtual presenters. [22][25][23]
JD's flagship automated fulfillment network is branded Asia No. 1 (亚洲一号). The first fully unmanned Asia No. 1 facility opened in Jiading district, Shanghai, in October 2017 and entered full commercial operation in early 2018. Covering a combined floor area of about 40,000 square meters and storing up to 60,000 boxes of goods, it was described by JD as the world's first fully unmanned e-commerce warehouse spanning receiving, storage, picking, packing, and sorting. The facility uses nearly 1,000 robots, including three types of six-axis robotic arms for storage and packaging and three types of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) for sorting and order picking, and originally operated with only four on-site staff while processing more than 200,000 orders per day. [26][27]
Subsequent Asia No. 1 facilities expanded the model nationwide. By 2024, JD had deployed more than 100 5G-powered AGVs at the Changsha Asia No. 1 logistics park alone, lifting that AGV zone's throughput above 110,000 items per day, and reported that intelligent-warehouse technology helped cut the company's group-wide fulfillment expense ratio to roughly 6.5 percent of revenue, an industry-leading figure. [27][28]
JD has been piloting autonomous last-mile delivery vehicles since 2016 and rolled out larger fleets across more than 30 Chinese cities by 2024. The vehicles can carry up to about 30 parcels each within a roughly 5-kilometer radius, plan their own routes, recognize traffic lights, and avoid obstacles. As of mid-2025, more than 600 of these vehicles were in commercial operation across communities, shopping centers, and office buildings. JD says hybrid "half-half" delivery stations combining couriers and robots can handle up to 2,000 packages per day. [29][30]
In October 2025, JD Logistics announced a five-year plan to procure roughly 3 million robots, 1 million autonomous vehicles, and 100,000 drones, alongside building what it described as the world's first fully unmanned delivery station. [29]
JD launched its drone delivery program in 2016, becoming what the company calls the first e-commerce operator anywhere to put delivery drones into regular commercial service. Initial routes covered remote villages on the outskirts of Beijing and in Jiangsu, Shaanxi, and Sichuan provinces, with drones flying scheduled routes from regional delivery stations to designated drop points where local "village promoters" carried out the final hand-off. The fleet typically transports parcels weighing 5 to 30 kilograms, and JD has tested heavy-lift designs capable of carrying loads of about one metric ton over longer ranges. JD operates dedicated drone-delivery operations centers in Xi'an and Suqian. [31][32][33]
In July 2025, JD made an unusually concentrated bet on embodied AI, leading or co-leading three financing rounds for humanoid-robot startups in a single day:
At the 2025 World Robot Conference in Beijing on 8 August 2025, JD served as the event's exclusive global strategic partner and announced an Intelligent Robot Industry Acceleration Plan committing more than RMB 10 billion in resources. The plan aims to help 100 robotics brands each reach RMB 1 billion in annual sales within three years and to push intelligent robots into more than one million end-user scenarios. JD plans to integrate its JoyInside conversational AI stack into partner products and to use its 600 million consumer accounts and 8 million enterprise customers as a distribution channel. [35][36]
In December 2025, JD opened the first nationwide physical retail store for Unitree Robotics at JD Mall in Shuangjing, Beijing, displaying the Go2 robot dog (priced from CNY 19,999), the G1 humanoid (from about CNY 85,000), and the newly launched R1 humanoid (from CNY 29,900). The store is jointly operated by Unitree and JD and is positioned as a model for bringing consumer-grade humanoid robots into mainstream retail channels. [37]
| Robotics deployment | Year | Function | Scale (latest disclosed) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asia No. 1 unmanned warehouse, Shanghai | 2017-2018 | Fully automated receiving, storage, picking, packing, sorting | About 1,000 robots; >200,000 orders per day |
| 5G-powered AGVs, Changsha Asia No. 1 | 2020 | Sorting and intra-warehouse transport | >100 AGVs; >110,000 items per day in AGV zone |
| Drone delivery program | 2016 | Last-mile delivery to rural villages | Operations centers in Xi'an and Suqian; payloads of 5-30 kg, with one-ton prototypes |
| Autonomous delivery vehicles | 2016 (pilot) / 2020 (fleet) | Last-mile package delivery on public roads | >600 vehicles across 30+ cities; up to 30 parcels per trip |
| Logistics Brain digital twin | 2024 | Real-time supply-chain simulation and routing | Used to plan billions of orders during 2024 Singles' Day |
| LimX Dynamics, Spirit AI, EngineAI investments | 2025 | Humanoid robots and VLA models | About RMB 600 million in Spirit AI; RMB 1 billion combined in EngineAI rounds |
| Unitree x JD physical store, Beijing | 2025 | Consumer-facing retail of robot dogs and humanoid robots | One flagship store; sole nationwide co-operated location |
| Five-year procurement plan | 2025 | Internal logistics automation | About 3 million robots, 1 million autonomous vehicles, 100,000 drones |
JD Cloud (originally JD Cloud & AI) is the unit responsible for selling JD's AI capabilities outside the group. The company's first commercial cloud services launched in 2016, and in 2021 the unit was reorganized and folded into JD's fintech arm before being repositioned around the public cloud business. JD Cloud markets itself as a full-service provider covering public, private, hybrid, and dedicated cloud deployments across eight availability zones in mainland China. According to figures published by the company, JD Cloud serves more than 95 percent of large central state-owned enterprises, more than 2,000 large enterprises, more than 900 financial institutions, and over two million small and medium-sized enterprises. [37][38]
The key AI-related products inside JD Cloud are:
In 2019, JD Cloud signed a notable international partnership with Cloudflare to extend Cloudflare's network to Chinese mainland customers and to give JD Cloud customers access to Cloudflare's global edge, illustrating how JD has tried to position its cloud business as a bridge for foreign brands operating in China. [39]
JD's international footprint has historically lagged its domestic dominance, but the company has steadily extended its logistics and B2B operations abroad. JD Logistics now operates more than 100 bonded, overseas, and direct-mail warehouses in roughly 20 countries, and JD Worldwide handles cross-border imports for Chinese consumers. The company also operates Joybuy and Ochama (a Europe-focused omni-channel grocery and lifestyle brand). In 2024, JD Logistics began offering an international express service to compete more directly with global integrators on intercontinental e-commerce flows. [12][40]
JD has been widely credited with raising the bar for delivery speed and order accuracy in Chinese e-commerce, and its early bets on robotics and drones are frequently cited as landmark deployments. Foreign reporting from outlets such as Reuters, Bloomberg, the South China Morning Post, and Caixin has often singled out the Asia No. 1 warehouses, the Yanxi customer-service platform, and the ChatRhino LLM as benchmarks for industrial AI adoption in China. [3][22][29]
At the same time, the company has faced periodic headwinds. Liu Qiangdong's 2018 arrest in Minneapolis on accusations of sexual misconduct (later resolved with no criminal charges and a 2022 civil settlement) had a sustained impact on JD's investor relations. The Chinese government's broader 2020-2022 internet-platform crackdown weighed on JD alongside Alibaba and other peers, and JD has had to navigate slowing consumer demand, intensifying competition from Pinduoduo and ByteDance's Douyin Mall, and Walmart's full divestment in 2024. The company's heavy capital expenditure on robots, fulfillment centers, and AI infrastructure has historically pressured margins compared with platform-only competitors. [7][11]