Organic light-emitting devices (OLEDs) emissive in short-wavelength infrared (SWIR) region are attractive for ground-breaking applications in biosensors, biomedical imaging and next-generation optoelectronic devices. However, fabrication of such devices with high radiance has not yet been achieved, owing to an intrinsic limitation imposed by the energy-gap law, which leads to extremely low emission efficiency. Here we report that acceptor-donor-acceptor (A-D-A) type molecules with high co-planarity, rigidity of π-conjugated backbones, extremely small reorganization energy and electron-phonon coupling factor are capable of simultaneously providing strongly suppressed non-radiative recombination rate, and high operation stability at high current density. We achieve electrically driven SWIR with irradiance of 3.9 mW cm^-2 (corresponding to 7% of direct sunlight infrared irradiance), which is the brightest emission to date and surpasses that of any previously reported SWIR OLEDs sixty-fold. These findings should open a wide avenue to a new class of organic SWIR light sources for broad applications.