Guangzhou to speed up smart city construction: Official

Guangdong's provincial capital will further expand investment to speed up construction of a smart city, with digital and information infrastructural facilities leading major cities in the prosperous Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area by 2022, an official said.

Zhang Hongwei, deputy director of the Guangzhou Bureau of Industry and Information Technology, said the city's government has promised to name its priorities to accelerate the development of 5G, artificial intelligence, big data and the internet of things industries in the following months.

"Guangzhou, as a national central city in the country, has now mapped out its ambitions for the development of its digital and intelligent economy and will introduce more preferential policies to help achieve the goal," Zhang said at a press conference in this southern metropolis on Wednesday.

According to Zhang, Guangzhou, one of the first group model cities for pilot commercial utilization of 5G technology in the mainland, will build more than 80,000 5G base stations, with a total investment of more than 30 billion yuan ($4.28 billion) before 2022.

And Guangzhou's measure of artificial intelligent industrial scale is planned to total more than 120 billion yuan annually by the end of 2022, he said.

Meanwhile, the city will further upgrade its intelligent charging facilities and accelerate the city's construction of Internet Plus charging infrastructural facilities in the months ahead, Zhang said.

The move aims to further boost the development of the city's new energy automobile industry to help construct a green and environmentally friendly city.

By the end of 2022, the city will have constructed more than 4,000 public charging stations, with more than 50,000 public charging points in the entire city, Zhang added.