Google has given Chinese online retailer JD.com a $550m (£415m) cash injection, as part of the US tech giant’s push to increase its presence in Asian markets.
Google will promote JD.com products through its online shopping platform “across the world” for starters, but the two firms “have other collaborations in mind for the future”, according to the tech news site.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
The deal is another significant step for Google in its bid to boost its presence in East Asian markets.
The firm’s search engine was banned in China in 2010 when the company refused to censor search results to “comply with local laws”, The Daily Telegraph reports.
Since then Google has been looking at other avenues to increase its investment in East Asian, the newspaper says. The company bought a stake in Indonesian ride-hailing firm Go-Jek in January.
And the previous month saw Google open an artificial intelligence (AI) research facility in Beijing, where it hopes to work “closely with the vibrant Chinese AI research community”.
-
Political cartoons for November 8Cartoons Saturday’s political cartoons include narco boats, and the new Lincoln monument
-
Why Trump pardoned crypto criminal Changpeng ZhaoIn the Spotlight Binance founder’s tactical pardon shows recklessness is rewarded by the Trump White House
-
Crossword: November 8, 2025The Week's daily crossword puzzle
-
How the online world relies on AWS cloud serversThe Explainer Chaos caused by Monday’s online outage shows that ‘when AWS sneezes, half the internet catches the flu’
-
Is the UK government getting too close to Big Tech?Today’s Big Question US-UK tech pact, supported by Nvidia and OpenAI, is part of Silicon Valley drive to ‘lock in’ American AI with US allies
-
Google: A monopoly past its prime?Feature Google’s antitrust case ends with a slap on the wrist as courts struggle to keep up with the tech industry’s rapid changes
-
South Korea's divide over allowing Google MapsTalking Points The country is one of few modern democracies where the app doesn't work
-
Google avoids the worst in antitrust rulingSpeed Read A federal judge rejected the government's request to break up Google
-
Is AI killing the internet?Talking Point AI-powered browsers and search engines are threatening the death of the open web
-
Unreal: A quantum leap in AI videoFeature Google's new Veo 3 is making it harder to distinguish between real videos and AI-generated ones
-
Google's new AI Mode feature hints at the next era of searchIn the Spotlight The search giant is going all in on AI, much to the chagrin of the rest of the web
