JD.com expands physical AI in logistics with 3 million robots
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JD.com is expanding AI and robotics across its logistics network under a new Physical AI Acceleration Plan, announced at JDDiscovery 2026 in Beijing, while restating a five-year target to procure 3 million robots, 1 million autonomous vehicles, and 100,000 delivery drones. JD Logistics also introduced its industrial Wolf Robot series for warehousing, sorting, transport, and delivery, alongside specialised systems such as equipment that operates at temperatures as low as minus 20 degrees Celsius, automated pharmacy dispatch systems, autonomous vehicles, and drones. As of June 30, its LangzuTech Goods-to-Person automated warehousing system was deployed in more than 30 warehouses in China, with deployments also launched in the UK and Germany, while its wider network included over 1,800 self-operated warehouses and more than 2,000 third-party cloud warehouses covering over 36 million square metres. Thousands of unmanned vehicles were in regular operation across more than 20 Chinese provinces by end-June, and more than 100 domestic drone routes served parcel and food delivery, emergency medicine transport, and disaster relief. JD Logistics links its equipment to Meta Brain, an AI system that the company says can calculate optimal routes for hundreds of millions of parcels in seconds, and which also powers the LangzuTech Packer robotic arm that uses parallel reinforcement learning to optimise parcel placement and loading. JD Cloud plans to work with chipmaker Moore Threads on a 100,000-GPU cluster for large-model and embodied-AI workloads, following an earlier 10,000-GPU cluster, and intends to collect more than 10 million hours of real-world video over two years for embodied-AI training. The company has extended autonomous vehicle operations to night-time routes in Shenzhen and launched a drone network in Zizhong, Sichuan, covering 78 administrative villages, and it did not disclose the total cost or a network-wide return-on-investment target for the procurement programme. JD Logistics spent RMB2.3 billion on R&D in the first half of 2026, up 23.7%, and said it operates eight robot repair centres in China with plans to expand robotics after-sales capabilities that it expects to support more than 100,000 robotics service engineer jobs.
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