JDDiscovery 2026: JD.com Expands AI with 3M Robots
JD.com launched its Physical AI Acceleration Plan in Beijing, aiming to procure 3 million robots, 1 million autonomous vehicles, and 100,000 drones over five years while unveiling Wolf industrial robots.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- JD.com launched the Physical AI Acceleration Plan at JDDiscovery 2026 in Beijing.
- The company aims to procure 3 million robots, 1 million autonomous vehicles, and 100,000 drones over five years.
- JD Logistics unveiled the Wolf industrial robot series and upgraded Meta Brain 3.0 for routing.
- JD Cloud partners with Moore Threads to build a 100,000-GPU cluster for advanced AI training.
JD.com is scaling up artificial intelligence and robotics across its logistics network under a new Physical AI Acceleration Plan, reaffirming its five-year target to procure 3 million robots, 1 million autonomous vehicles, and 100,000 delivery drones. The company debuted the initiative at JDDiscovery 2026 in Beijing, where JD Logistics also introduced its industrial Wolf Robot series designed for warehousing, sorting, transport, and delivery operations.
Specialized hardware unveiled includes equipment rated for temperatures as low as minus 20 degrees Celsius, automated pharmacy dispatch systems, autonomous delivery vehicles, and drones. This five-year procurement strategy builds upon existing automation deployed by JD Logistics. As of June 30, its LangzuTech Goods-to-Person automated warehousing system was operational in over 30 warehouses across China, with initial deployments also launched in the UK and Germany. The broader warehouse network encompassed more than 1,800 self-operated facilities and over 2,000 third-party cloud warehouses on its Open Warehouse Platform, spanning over 36 million square meters in aggregate.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
To manage physical assets, JD Logistics integrates its hardware with Meta Brain, an AI platform utilized across warehousing, transportation, and delivery. JD noted that Meta Brain 3.0 computes optimal routing for hundreds of millions of parcels in seconds rather than minutes. The AI system also powers the LangzuTech Packer robotic arm, which combines multimodal sensor data to track, grasp, and place differently shaped parcels. By June, the Packer was running around the clock at multiple JD Logistics parks, utilizing parallel reinforcement learning in simulated environments to optimize loading layouts.
JD.com's aggressive push into physical AI and robotics highlights a broader strategic shift within China's e-commerce sector, where competition has transitioned from heavy delivery subsidies toward deep supply chain infrastructure and automation. By partnering with domestic chipmaker Moore Threads for a massive 100,000-GPU cluster, JD is actively securing its proprietary computational pipeline for large-scale model training and embodied AI workloads, mitigating potential external supply bottlenecks.
In parallel, JD Cloud plans to collaborate with Chinese chipmaker Moore Threads on a cluster containing 100,000 GPUs to support large-model training, inference, and embodied-AI workloads. JD Cloud also intends to gather over 10 million hours of real-world human activity video over the next two years to train embodied AI systems. Beyond static warehousing, JD Logistics has extended its autonomous vehicle network into night-time operations in Shenzhen and deployed a rural drone delivery network in Zizhong, Sichuan province, covering 78 administrative villages where mountain deliveries can take as little as seven minutes.
Financial filings show JD Logistics spent RMB 2.3 billion on research and development during the first half of 2026, marking a 23.7% increase year-over-year. As competition among major Chinese e-commerce giants including Alibaba and Meituan intensifies around fulfillment infrastructure, labor models are also evolving. JD founder Richard Liu previously noted that robots would eventually handle parcel delivery tasks currently performed by human couriers, with JD partnering with approximately 120 educational institutions to retrain workers for roles such as robotic maintenance and engineering, supporting over 100,000 specialized service jobs.
Source: AI News
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