On Feb 12, Tsinghua Unigroup Ltd, China's leading chip maker, signed a strategic agreement with Chongqing Commission of Economy and Information Technology and Liangjiang New Area to build an industrial park in Chongqing with an estimated investment of over 60 billion yuan ($9.52 billion).

This is the biggest industrial investment after Chongqing became the country's fourth municipality in 1997.

Tsinghua Unigroup Ltd plans to build seven projects in the industrial park including “intelligent safeguard system+AI”, digital television chip, Unigroup service center and R & D center, smart terminal advanced chip design, financial technology, industrial 4.0 smart factory and manufacturing base of integrated circuits and high-end chips.  

Unigroup's industrial park in Chongqing will boost the development of upstream and downstream firms and aims to generate an annual total sales revenue of over 100 billion yuan after going into operation.

Memory chips are widely used in high-end data storage products on electronic devices such as smart phones, personal computers and data servers.

China, though one of the world's largest manufacturing powerhouses for electronic devices, primarily relies on foreign companies for high-end processors.

Unigroup's industrial park in Chongqing will break the monopoly on the technology and the market by foreign companies.

Chongqing is a new electronics production base in China, with the electronics industry contributing more than 570 billion yuan, or one fourth of its industrial output in 2017.

In recent years, Unigroup, China's top State-owned chip manufacturer, has unveiled plans to build memory chip factories in Wuhan, Nanjing, and Chengdu, as part of its blueprint for its 100 billion dollar development in the coming ten years.