JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce company, has unveiled a plan to introduce 3 million robots over the next five years to fully automate its nationwide logistics network.

On Sept. 9, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported that JD Logistics unveiled its industrial "Wolf Robot" series at an event in Beijing and set out a large-scale automation blueprint that includes 1 million driverless vehicles and 100,000 delivery drones.

The core of the plan is to have machines take over repetitive tasks at logistics sites in place of people. Cao Peng (차오펑), chairman of the JD Logistics technology committee, said the company will procure the equipment over the next five years to build a fully automated supply chain. Liu Lige (류리거), head of embodied-intelligence robots at JD Logistics, said the Wolf robot system is designed to handle picking, sorting, transport and delivery with minimal human intervention.

The robots JD has unveiled include equipment that operates in minus 20 degrees Celsius conditions, automated pharmacy dispatch equipment and delivery drones. JD plans to apply automation first to labor-intensive, repetitive work and environments that are difficult to staff with people.

The shift is also tied to the existing employment structure. JD and companies in its affiliate ecosystem employ about 700,000 delivery and logistics workers. With concerns rising that expanded automation could shrink jobs, founder Richard Liu (류창둥) presented the "Nirvana Plan" earlier this year. The plan focuses on retaining on-site staff by retraining delivery drivers and warehouse workers for technical roles such as robot services and maintenance.

Along with expanding hardware, JD highlighted data acquisition as a core of competition in embodied artificial intelligence. Training general-purpose embodied AI models requires large-scale data, and JD said it will use offline sites such as warehouses, retail stores and pharmacies to collect more than 10 million hours of real operational data. Cao said this physical operating base would be a strength for the company.

It is also expanding its research and development infrastructure. JD plans to set up more than 80 "RoboBase" sites across China to handle robot research, pilot production, data annotation, equipment upgrades and maintenance. The company aims to build development and operations systems alongside mass deployment of automation equipment.

JD is also moving to secure computing resources. JD signed a contract that day with Chinese chip designer Moore Threads to build a computing cluster powered by 100,000 domestically made chips. The two companies said they plan to use the cluster for AI model training and inference and embodied AI applications, and to integrate domestic chips into a development pipeline that runs from data collection to model training, simulation and deployment.

JD's logistics automation strategy is therefore expanding beyond robot deployment to cover data collection, research sites and chip-based computing infrastructure. How quickly automation proceeds and how far retraining advances for the 700,000-strong on-site workforce is expected to be a key point to watch.