Cloudflare and JD Cloud & AI Team Up for Cross-Border Network Coverage
Cloudflare has announced a strategic partnership with JD Cloud & AI, the cloud and intelligent technology business unit of JD.com, to extend its network into mainland China. The deal adds 150 data centers across the region, an increase of more than 700%, and creates a path for both international companies seeking better performance in China and Chinese enterprises aiming to reach global users.
The move addresses a persistent problem: Internet traffic to and from China often suffers from poor performance due to a fragmented network infrastructure and regulatory constraints. With global traffic up 30% over the past month amid the pandemic, those bottlenecks are becoming more acute. Users in China may face extended delays or be unable to access applications hosted elsewhere, and the reverse is true for users outside China trying to reach services hosted inside the country.
Why China’s Network Is Different
China’s Internet architecture is unlike most of the world’s. The country has three major telecom carriers—China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile—operating across 22 provinces, 4 municipalities, and 5 autonomous regions. Within and across these regions, the carriers frequently operate distinct, independent networks, creating a patchwork of sub-networks that require careful coordination.
Regulatory rules add another layer of complexity. Anycast routing, common elsewhere, is largely unavailable in China. The three main ISPs control IP address allocation and routing, and most companies—large or small—do not own their own IP allocations. Few use BGP to manage routing, meaning customer traffic is homed onto a single network’s backbone. That single-homed connectivity, combined with the fragmented topology, leads to frequent bottlenecks between domestic ISPs.
The logistical landscape is no simpler. Regulations vary dramatically across provinces and are enforced at national, regional, and local tiers. The transportation and logistics market is among the most regulated in the world, and there are shortages of quality warehousing and logistics facilities. Foreign companies often need specialized consultants just to assess providers for import, export, and trade compliance.
Why JD Cloud & AI
Cloudflare has served customers in China since its inception and has offered China-based delivery through data centers in 17 mainland cities since 2015. Demand led the company to seek a partner that could provide far broader coverage, and JD Cloud & AI brings the scale of its parent company, JD.com.
JD.com is China’s largest retailer by revenue, with one billion retail customers, a quarter billion registered users, seven million enterprise customers, and $83 billion in 2019 revenue. Its logistics system—using robots, AI, and drone fleets—covers 99% of China’s population. JD Cloud & AI, launched when JD.com opened its technology platform to enterprise customers, has become the fastest-growing cloud provider among China’s top five. It operates across eight availability zones and counts security and compliance as core pillars of its offering.
What the Partnership Delivers
The combined network gives enterprises a unified way to deploy services in and out of China. International businesses can use Cloudflare’s global network outside China and JD Cloud & AI’s in-country infrastructure to deliver cloud-based firewall, WAN optimization, DDoS mitigation, content delivery, DNS, and Cloudflare Workers—all managed from the same Cloudflare dashboard with the same configurations used elsewhere. No additional hardware is required.
For customers that need physical distribution, JD.com brings its network of 700+ warehouses covering nearly all of China’s counties and districts, plus access to over 360 million active individual consumers and seven million enterprise buyers on its platform.
Chinese enterprises also benefit in reverse: JD Cloud & AI customers can use Cloudflare’s international network to reach global audiences with performance and security services controlled from within the JD Cloud & AI dashboard.
Data Handling and Next Steps
Cloudflare operates all services outside China; JD Cloud & AI operates all services inside. No Cloudflare customer traffic flows through the China network unless a customer explicitly opts in. Even for those who do, traffic and log data originating outside China is not stored on the China network and is not shared with the partner.
New and existing Cloudflare customers can request service in China by submitting a request at https://www.cloudflare.com/china.
