Alibaba Cloud founder Wang Jian tells Hong Kong to aim for the skies in moonshot project with China’s space telescope, aspire to be world’s first digitalised city
- Tech mogul suggests concept of ‘city brains’ – using technology to sustainably power a metropolis and digitalise it
- He says a ‘sky cloud’ project tied to China’s space mission could spawn other new technologies
Hong Kong is well positioned to become a global astronomy research hub using its work with China’s first space-based telescope to attract talent and develop new technologies, according to Alibaba Cloud founder Wang Jian.
The financial hub, with a population of more than 7 million, could also become the world’s first digitalised city by leaning on technology for sustainable resource consumption, Wang told the South China Morning Post’s China Conference: Hong Kong 2023 on Tuesday.
Wang has earned recognition for his role in building the cloud business from scratch for e-commerce giant Alibaba, which owns the Post. He said at Tuesday’s event that Hong Kong could attract the best talent with a moonshot project.
With the Chinese Survey Space Telescope, also known as Xuntian, expected to be launched later this year and placed into orbit with the China Space Station in 2024, Wang said he believed Hong Kong could host a “sky cloud” hub for global researchers to make astronomical discoveries.
The nation’s first space-based optical observatory, with a 2.5 billion-pixel camera that has a field of view 300 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope, will allow astronomers to map up to 40 per cent of the skies over 10 years.
“Processing the images we get from the universe seems useless, but as a technologist I think having a project like this can generate a lot of technology that has great potential for the economy, for the social environment and even for talent,” Wang said.
