East China province to expand digital economy scale

JINAN -- East China's Shandong province plans to ramp up efforts to bring its digital economy to a world-class level by 2030, according to a press briefing held in the capital city of Jinan on Monday.

The province aims to foster innovative enterprises and industrial clusters in Jinan and build it into a national leading technology center in computing power, arithmetic, and algorithms based on its advantages in computing power infrastructure.

Jinan has attracted 56.6 billion yuan (about $8.4 billion) in investment, covering 68 projects in 12 categories to expand its digital industrial scale.

By 2022, the city is expected to see the industrial scale of the digital sector surpassing 530 billion yuan, accounting for over 47 percent of its total GDP, supported by technological innovation in servers, supercomputing, quantum information, software, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchains.

By 2030, the digital industrial scale is expected to exceed 1 trillion yuan, and the digital economy will account for over 60 percent of the total GDP, according to a provincial plan.

In 2019, the digital economy in Jinan took up about 39 percent of GDP, and more than half of the country's AI computing power in China comes from Jinan, said Ji Peide, director of the municipal bureau of industry and information technology.