Node.js is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. It allows JavaScript to be run on the server-side and uses asynchronous and event-driven programming. Node.js uses non-blocking I/O to make it efficient for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices. It has a large community and ecosystem of open source libraries. While single-threaded, it allows for high concurrency through asynchronous and event-driven programming without threads.