Kai-Fu Lee
Taiwanese businessman
Kai-Fu Lee (traditional Chinese: 李開復; simplified Chinese: 李开复; pinyin: Lǐ Kāifù; born December 3, 1961) is a Taiwanese computer scientist, investor, and author. He was the founding director of Microsoft Research China, later Microsoft Research Asia, serving from 1998 to 2000, and served as president of Google China 2005 to 2009.
In 2009, Lee founded the venture capital firm Innovation Works, later renamed Sinovation Ventures. In 2023, he founded 01.AI, a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company.
Lee is the author of AI Superpowers (2018) and AI 2041 (with Chen Qiufan, 2021). He has served as co‑chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council and was named to TIME's 2023 list of the 100 most influential people in AI.
Early life and education
Lee was born in Taipei, Taiwan. He is the son of Li Tianmin, a legislator and historian from Sichuan, China. Lee has detailed his personal life and career history in his autobiography in both Chinese and English, Making a World of Difference, published in October 2011.
In 1973, Lee immigrated to the United States and attended Oak Ridge High School in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He received a Bachelor of Science, summa cum laude, with a major in computer science from Columbia University in 1983.
The public source identifies “Kai-Fu Lee” as taiwanese businessman. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Kai-Fu, Taiwanese and businessman.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q699605. VIAF identifies the subject as 40928291. The Library of Congress control number is n88119198. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1961, 1998, 2000 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kai-Fu Lee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.