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The explosive growth of AI applications has created a pressing need for globally distributed, low-latency infrastructure to run AI models. Cloudflare, the connectivity cloud company, and JD Cloud, an intelligent technology service provider, have announced a significant expansion of their partnership aimed at building a seamless, high-performance global platform for deploying and scaling AI inference workloads for developers worldwide.
Cloudflare and JD Cloud are expanding their partnership to create a unified global platform for AI inference deployment and scaling.
The platform is projected to reduce latency for AI inference workloads by up to 80% by leveraging geographically distributed infrastructure.
It aims to seamlessly connect global developers to the China market and Chinese developers to the rest of the world.
The partnership builds on a five-year foundation, integrating Cloudflare's global network with JD Cloud's local infrastructure in China.
The solution provides a unified networking and security experience, including DDoS protection and a global CDN, activated with minimal code changes.
The goal is to eliminate technical and logistical hurdles for developers building and running AI applications in a competitive international landscape.
As AI-driven applications become mainstream, the demand for fast, reliable inference—the process of running live data through a trained AI model—has skyrocketed. Performance hinges on low latency, which requires computation to happen physically close to the end-user. This partnership directly addresses that challenge by combining Cloudflare's vast, intelligent global network with JD Cloud's robust infrastructure and deep presence in China.
The integrated platform is designed to function as a cohesive "AI Cloud," automatically routing user traffic to the nearest optimal data center. For users in China, traffic is served from JD Cloud's local facilities, while the rest of the world is served from Cloudflare's global edge network. “The future of AI depends on a truly global network that can keep up. Our partnership with JD Cloud makes that possible—giving developers a simple, reliable way to build and run AI applications seamlessly across the world,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare.
A key advantage of the expanded partnership is its simplicity for developers. Building on five years of collaboration, the companies have created a unified experience that allows customers to activate a secure, optimized presence in China "with just a few clicks—without changing a single line of code." This dramatically reduces the complexity and time-to-market for global AI applications.
Once enabled, the platform doesn't just reduce latency; it also incorporates Cloudflare's comprehensive security suite. This includes its cloud-based Web Application Firewall (WAF), advanced DDoS mitigation, and global Content Delivery Network (CDN), ensuring that AI applications are not only fast but also protected against threats. This end-to-end approach provides developers with the performance and security foundation needed to scale with confidence.
The strategic expansion is about more than infrastructure—it's about connectivity and access. By bridging Cloudflare's global reach with JD Cloud's local expertise, the partnership aims to dismantle barriers for developers on both sides. It empowers global developers to reliably serve the massive Chinese market and enables Chinese developers to seamlessly reach international users, all on a single, high-performance platform.
JD Cloud stated that Cloudflare's mission complements its commitment to delivering premier services. By leveraging JD.com's extensive business experience and technological capabilities, the partnership is positioned to deliver market-leading services, ensuring that businesses can deploy and scale their AI innovations in a competitive global landscape without being hampered by network boundaries or performance limitations.
About Cloudflare
Cloudflare, Inc. is the leading connectivity cloud company on a mission to help build a better Internet. It empowers organizations to make their employees, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and cost. Cloudflare’s connectivity cloud delivers the most full-featured, unified platform of cloud-native products and developer tools, so any organization can gain the control they need to work, develop, and accelerate their business. Powered by one of the world’s largest and most interconnected networks, Cloudflare blocks billions of threats online for its customers every day.
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