(Yicai Global) July 21 -- China's Zhejiang province has named the founder of Alibaba Group Holding's cloud computing arm as the new director of its artificial intelligence lab.

Wang Jian, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and founder of Alibaba Cloud, will lead Zhejiang Laboratory's 2,200 employees, the provincial government said on July 18.

Wang, 60, is an expert in cloud computing technology and set up Alibaba Cloud in September 2009. Before 2013 he was Alibaba Cloud’s president and managed the development of Apsara, a cloud operating system. Prior to joining Alibaba, Wang was executive vice president at Microsoft Research Asia.

Founded in September 2017, Hangzhou-based Zhejiang Lab is sponsored by the Zhejiang government and co-organized by Zhejiang University to focus on intelligent perception, AI, and intelligent computing, networks and systems. As of May, over 90 percent of its research staff had doctoral degrees.

“Zhejiang Lab is the lab with the largest scale and the most investment in Zhejiang province,” Zhu Shiqiang, the lab's first director, said at its opening ceremony in 2017.

Zhejiang Lab formed the National Standardization Working Group on Intelligent Computing on June 30 to build a standard system in the field of smart computing and accelerate the formulation of standards in the areas of processing memory, graph computing, brain-inspired computing, photoelectric computing, supercomputing internet, and scientific computing.

Editor: Futura Costaglione