Jasper Zhang, also known as Yue Zhang, is a mathematician and entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and CEO of Hyperbolic, a company building decentralized infrastructure for artificial intelligence. He earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics from UC Berkeley in two years, worked as a quantitative researcher at Citadel Securities, and served as a senior blockchain researcher at Ava Labs before founding Hyperbolic in late 2022.
Who Is Jasper Zhang?
Jasper Zhang showed an early aptitude for mathematics, sharpening his skills in childhood by competing in math challenges with his mother, according to Hyperbolic’s company blog. During high school, he won gold medals at both the Chinese Mathematical Olympiad and the All-Russian Mathematical Olympiad. He went on to place first in the 2017 Chinese Mathematics Competition for College Students and earned two consecutive gold medals at the Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition in 2018 and 2020, celebrating at an Alibaba awards ceremony with a rap performance.
Zhang earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Peking University in 2018, then began doctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 2020 after just two years, which Hyperbolic states is the fastest Ph.D. completion in UC Berkeley’s history. His doctoral thesis, “Guts, Dehn Fillings and Volumes of Hyperbolic Manifolds,” focused on three-dimensional topology and hyperbolic manifolds and later inspired his company’s name.
At the Alibaba awards ceremony, Zhang described his ambition at the time: “My dream is to become a mathematician who can have an impact on mathematics, even the world, and to cultivate the next generation of students who are interested in mathematics.”
Jasper Zhang’s Career and Contributions
After completing his doctorate, Zhang worked as a quantitative researcher at Citadel Securities, applying mathematical and statistical methods to financial markets. He then transitioned into blockchain research as a senior blockchain researcher at Ava Labs, the company behind Avalanche, where his work focused on the performance, reliability, and security of consensus protocols and distributed systems.
In late 2022, Zhang co-founded Hyperbolic, where he serves as CEO. The company builds what it calls an open-access AI cloud, which is basically a marketplace that aggregates underutilized GPUs from data centers worldwide. The platform combines GPU access, orchestration, verification, privacy, and inference services, letting researchers, startups, and AI teams build and scale without owning hardware.
Zhang has explained the founding motivation as a gap he kept seeing between open-source AI models and the compute needed to use them. In his words from Hyperbolic’s blog: “Open source does not mean open access.” He has framed Hyperbolic as a mission-driven company, stating that “the future of AI should not be controlled by a small group of people, but shared by everyone.”
Jasper Zhang’s Views and Positions
Zhang argues that the main bottleneck in AI development is not talent or ambition but access to compute. In an April 2025 interview on Venture with Grace Gong, he described growing demand for AI workloads putting pressure on GPU supply and made the case that flexible access models support experimentation and fine-tuning of specialized models as companies scale.
At the AI Engineer’s World Fair in August 2025, he argued that optimizing the use of existing, underutilized GPUs is more viable than relying solely on new data center construction, given infrastructure costs, grid constraints, and environmental concerns.
On the crypto side, Zhang has discussed blockchain as a coordination layer for decentralized AI. In a December 2024 appearance on the Show Me The Crypto podcast, he covered the use of blockchain to coordinate AI agents and build trust in autonomous systems, as well as the structure of a GPU marketplace designed to lower barriers to entry.
At TOKEN2049 Singapore in September 2024, he presented Hyperbolic’s verification and security mechanisms, including a sampling-based verification approach and trusted execution environments for reliability and privacy in decentralized computation. The intersection he works in is covered more broadly in our guide on artificial intelligence and crypto, which maps how the two fields are converging.
Frequently Asked Questions
Need a refresher? Here are the questions readers most often ask about Jasper Zhang.
Who is Jasper Zhang?
Jasper Zhang, also known as Yue Zhang, is a mathematician and entrepreneur who co-founded Hyperbolic, a decentralized AI infrastructure company, in late 2022 and serves as its CEO. Before Hyperbolic, he worked as a quantitative researcher at Citadel Securities and a senior blockchain researcher at Ava Labs.
What is Hyperbolic?
Hyperbolic is a company building an open-access AI cloud that aggregates underutilized GPUs from data centers worldwide into a marketplace where developers rent compute at market-driven rates. The platform combines GPU access, orchestration, verification, privacy, and inference services. Zhang co-founded the company toward the end of 2022 and serves as CEO.
How fast did Jasper Zhang complete his Ph.D.?
Zhang completed his Ph.D. in Mathematics at UC Berkeley in two years, finishing in 2020, which Hyperbolic states is the fastest Ph.D. completion in the university’s history. His thesis on hyperbolic manifolds in three-dimensional topology later inspired his company’s name.
What math competitions did Jasper Zhang win?
Zhang won gold medals at the Chinese Mathematical Olympiad and the All-Russian Mathematical Olympiad during high school, placed first in the 2017 Chinese Mathematics Competition for College Students, and earned gold medals at the Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition in both 2018 and 2020.
What did Jasper Zhang do before founding Hyperbolic?
After earning his Ph.D. in 2020, Zhang worked as a quantitative researcher at Citadel Securities, applying mathematical methods to financial markets. He then joined Ava Labs as a senior blockchain researcher, focusing on the performance, reliability, and security of consensus protocols, before leaving to co-found Hyperbolic.
