Zhang Hongjiang

Zhang Hongjiang is a distinguished computer scientist and technology executive. He helped shape early advances in multimedia search. Went on to lead large-scale technology businesses. Now, he advises investors and institutions on the next phase of AI and computing infrastructure.

Zhang is currently a Senior Advisor to The Carlyle Group and a Venture Partner at Source Code Capital. In parallel, he serves as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University. He also sits on the boards of several listed companies, including Ant Group and AAC Technologies Holdings, where he is Non-Executive Chairman.

Earlier in his career, Zhang was Chief Executive Officer of Kingsoft. During his tenure, he founded Kingsoft Cloud and led its early expansion into a major cloud services platform. Before that, he spent over a decade at Microsoft. There, he served as Chief Technology Officer of the Asia-Pacific R&D Group, Managing Director of the Advanced Technology Center, and a founding leader of Microsoft Research Asia. He was later named one of Microsoft’s first Distinguished Scientists.

Zhang Hongjiang is widely recognised for his contributions to media computing. His research in image and video analysis helped lay the groundwork for modern search and content systems. Over the years, he has published more than 400 papers and holds over 150 patents. Many of his works remain widely cited.

Zhang is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery. He is also a foreign member of the US National Academy of Engineering. His awards include the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award and the ACM SIGMM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award.

More recently, he founded the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, where he served as Chairman. He continues to take an active interest in the direction of large-scale computing and its wider economic impact. In particular, he has spoken on the growing demand for computing infrastructure, the shift from tools to AI assistants, and the implications of autonomous systems for work and society.

Zhang Hongjiang Zhang received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Denmark.