Mar 5, 2020|

JD Cloud & AI Becomes One of the Big 4 Following Retail, Logistics and Digits

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by Ella Kidron and Yuchuan Wang

JD.com announced that JD Cloud & AI would be the fourth core business to provide technology services, joining the ranks of major businesses, JD Retail, JD Logistics and JD Digits, on March 5th. The move also solidifies the importance of technology in the future growth of JD’s business.

JD Cloud & AI, consolidates JD’s strength in advanced technologies to provide a wholesale technology solution, internally for different segments of JD.com and externally for partners. Dr. Bowen Zhou, who also chairs the JD Technology Committee – a central decision-making center for technology related projects and talent management throughout the company, as well as an engine to increase JD’s influence in the broader technology community, is President of JD Cloud & AI. Zhou originally joined JD to lead the company’s AI division, and has since developed numerous solutions of JD.com, as well as commercial solutions for partners.

Dr. Bowen Zhou, President of JD Cloud & AI, Chair of JD Technology CommitteeDr. Bowen Zhou, President of JD Cloud & AI, Chair of JD Technology Committee

The elevated position of JD Cloud & AI also solidifies the establishment of JD’s overall technology strategy, which integrates several powerful technologies under one roof, and is referred to as ABCDE.

“Our research and development is broken down into ABCDE (AI, Big Data, Cloud, Devices, or IoT, and Exploration)” Zhou explains. “Looking more closely, if we are to imagine ABCDE as representing different parts of the human body, AI represents the brain, IoT represents the nerve endings, Cloud Computing represents the torso, muscles and blood vessels, and Big Data represents the oxygen that runs up and down the body. Finally, E is about maintaining a degree of curiosity, exploring new practices and pushing the edge of the aforementioned ABCD technologies.”

JD Cloud & AI logoJD Cloud & AI logo

The logo for JD Cloud & AI is representative of its mission. The “JD red” represents trust, JD’s founding value, “blue” represents technology, emphasizing JD’s commitment to technology development and innovation, and the infinity symbol represents a connected world and the constant development of advanced technologies

Through JD’s 16 years of development, the company has acquired extensive technological capabilities and infrastructure from retail to logistics to digital technology. JD’s R&D team now has over 18,000 personnel, among which over 80% hold masters or above degrees. In 2019, total investment by listed and unlisted affiliates of JD exceeded RMB 17.9 billion (USD 2.6 billion). Technology represents not just a new growth area for JD, but is mapping its future development, and the impact it will have on society as a whole.

“The next decade will be defined by the intelligence economy. It starts with trust and is differentiated by perspective. We will develop trustworthy technology and open it up to external partners,” Zhou further adds.

In 2019, the scale of JD’s cloud, AI and IoT business increased over 500%. It now has one of the largest Docker clusters and GPU clusters in China. According to IDC China’s Public Cloud Service Market report in 2019, JD is China’s top 10 public cloud IaaS provider, with a year-on-year growth 512% in terms of market share, the fastest in the industry. JD is also the operator of China’s largest smart home IoT platform that can connect 150 million devices serving 25 million families. JD’s NeuHub open AI platform, which offers AI APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) covering natural language processing, speech recognition, computer vision, and machine learning, links the demand and supply of various industries and was named as the core carrier for the National Open Innovation Platform for Next Generation AI in Smart Supply Chain.

 

(ella@jd.com; yuchuan.wang@jd.com)

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