(Yicai) May 27 -- Chinese property developer Greattown Holdings has invested in a joint venture to build a smart computing center platform in Fuzhou, southeastern Fujian province.

Greattown established a JV with an affiliate of Chinese artificial intelligence developer SenseTime Group and a unit of state-owned enterprise Fujian Big Data Group to build a 2,000-petaflop smart computing center platform in the Fuzhou New Area, the Shanghai-based firm announced on May 23. The center is expected to be completed and put into operation by the end of the year.

The project, which will provide services to business clients in Hong Kong, will be Fujian's first computing power cluster with a scale of over 2,000P, according to Greattown's statement.

One kilowatt-hour of electricity costs only 45 Chinese cents (6 US cents) in the Fuzhou New Area, thanks to offshore wind power farms and other factors, which is about one-third of the price in Hong Kong, Greattown's Chairman Yu Peidi said at a press conference on May 24. Moreover, Fuzhou also has a lower house rent, enabling the center's swift construction and launch of services, Yu noted.

Hong Kong is actively investing in AI, but the local computing power is relatively scarce. Almost half of the local AI companies have insufficient computing power, with about one-third of them using supercomputing centers from the Chinese mainland and over one-fourth of them using supercomputing centers from abroad, according to a survey. 

Greattown will take property and AI as its two main businesses in the future, Yu said, adding that the company will continue to increase investment in the AI sector and, in particular, in Fujian's digital economy, to gradually realize transformation and transition.

Greattown's property business scale is expected to contract in the next one to two years if the external environment does not improve significantly, Yu Jin, the firm's vice chair and general manager, said at a conference earlier this year.

Greattown reported a net profit of CNY223 million (USD30.8 million) and revenue of CNY11.7 billion (USD1.6 billion) last year. Even though the two figures' growth rates were higher than in the previous year, they were much lower than those in 2019 and 2020, before China's real estate industry entered into a severe crisis. 

Editors: Shi Yi, Futura Costaglione