The southwestern Chinese metropolis of Chongqing is stepping up the development of the digital economy to transform its traditional growth model of mainly relying on manufacturing.

In late June, cloud computing giant Alibaba Cloud launched an innovation center in the city in partnership with technological innovative platform Tsinghua Technology & Innovation Holdings Company. It plans to incubate more than 100 firms in cloud computing, big data, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and mobile Internet.

"Under the current entrepreneurial environment, each startup eager to grow up or succeed has to join a large 'ecosystem.' If a company has a good business model and can well match the new strategy of Alibaba, it will absolutely acquire various resources from us," Cao Ling, president of the operating company of the innovation center, told CGTN.

Carloha is one of the first companies that settled in the center. The New York-based used car e-commerce service provider just relocated its R&D center to this fast-growing city to tap into its potential.

"In my opinion, Chongqing is an emerging city for the Internet industry, and it has much more potential. The environment, people and the support from (the) government are all good," said Liang Long, CEO of Carloha, adding that the relatively lower labor cost is another reason behind this move.

The innovation center is located in the city's Liangjiang Digital Economy Industrial Park, a complex established in early 2018 to foster its digital economy. It aims to create a regional GDP of 50 billion yuan (7.3 billion U.S. dollars) by 2020.

CloudWalk is a landmark tech firm in the industrial park. Established in 2015, the world-leading facial recognition software developer chose Chongqing for its largest R&D center. Over the past few years, it has experienced fast growth, with its products and services widely applied across the country.

"Through our solutions integrating artificial intelligence, cognitive computing, big data and other technologies, we serve a wide range of areas including aviation, finance, public security and retail," Wang Fahang, deputy head of the company's AI research institute, told CGTN.

As more tech firms cluster here, Chongqing's traditional pillar industries like automotive production and electronics will be empowered with greater growth impetus, and the whole city is expected to get smarter.

"We will closely integrate with traditional manufacturing industry. For example, on the auto assembly line, the product percent of pass will be much improved through our core algorithm and image identification technologies," said Wang.

Wang added that they plan to create an ecosphere together with their upstream and downstream partners. 

"On the one hand, we can jointly establish laboratories or companies in Chongqing with government departments. Meanwhile, we can attract intelligent hardware companies like those producing surveillance cameras to the city," he said.

Now, the sprawling city along the Yangtze River has also gathered a batch of data centers specializing in data storage, processing and distribution. Tenglong, a leading data center customizer in China, just finished a new project for tech giant Tencent here in mid-June, which includes 2,200 high-density server cabinets.

"As a 'pedestal' enterprise for the big data industry, we hope we can cooperate with local government and telecom operators more to better serve the city's digital economy," said Zhang Liang, vice president of Tenglong Holding Group. 

(Cover: More than 2,000 server cabinets are placed in the newly-built data center of Tenglong Holding Group. /CGTN Photo)