The China (Hangzhou) Artificial Intelligence Town (CAIT), located in Yuhang district, Hangzhou city, attracts 2.2 billion yuan in investment over the first half of this year, more than any other featured town in the province. [Photo/ zj.zjol.com.cn]

The Zhejiang provincial government held an investment promotion conference for the province's "featured towns" in the China (Hangzhou) Artificial Intelligence Town (CAIT) in the provincial capital of Hangzhou on Aug 3.

Zhejiang first proposed developing featured towns in its provincial government work report in 2015. A "featured town" is not necessarily a town in an administrative sense, but is often a special zone tasked with developing specific industry segments through favorable policies and financial support.

The conference included the signing ceremonies for 12 investment projects receiving over one billion yuan ($144 million) in investment (totaling 19.6 billion yuan), as well as presentations for another 110 projects worth a total of 80 billion yuan to be rolled out across the province. The 122 featured town projects involve nearly 100 billion yuan in investment.

The projects involve high-end equipment manufacturing, the digital economy, the health industry, and more. One of the most notable projects is a five-billion-yuan investment for the We Doctor International Digital Health Center in the Information Bay Town of Hangzhou's Xiaoshan district.

Zhejiang has officially granted the title of "featured town" to 22 places across the province, with 110 places being considered for the title. The 22 towns focus on a wide range of industry segments, such as cloud computing, online entertainment, intelligent equipment, fashion design, wealth management, new energy, geographic information, tea planting, and rural tourism.

In 2019, featured towns and featured town candidates occupied 1.8 percent of construction area in the province while accounting for 7.9 percent of the province's industrial output and 7 percent of its tax revenue.

Despite the adverse effects of the COVID-19 epidemic this year, the featured towns managed to continue attracting investment. A total of 41.48 billion yuan was invested into the 110 featured town candidates over the first half of this year, up 3.9 percent from the previous year. With the epidemic in China waning, the second quarter saw investment grow by 21 percent year-on-year in these towns, 10.4 percentage points higher than the provincial average.