The Hong Kong Science and Technology Park (HKSTP) and SenseTime, a Chinese artificial intelligence firm headquartered and listed in the city, have partnered to build a home-grown AI data centre by 2030 to support the sector’s industrialisation.

The data centre will be built in three stages, with phase one expected for completion by the end of this year, targeting 40,000 petaflops – a measure of computing power used to train AI models – by 2030, the HKSTP said on Tuesday.

Terry Wong Ping-sau, HKSTP’s CEO, said the partnership would “propel the thriving development of Hong Kong’s ‘AI+’ Information and Technology ecosystem,” moving the city towards AI industrialisation and the AI-enabled transformation of industries.

He also said that the Science Park had attracted more than 500 AI companies with over 5,000 AI specialists.

Xu Li, chairman and CEO of SenseTime, said the company and the Science Park were “highly complementary partners” that could build deep industrial-chain coverage to drive end-to-end innovation across the sector.

He said SenseTime could leverage Hong Kong’s strengths in finance and legal services to complement mainland Chinese industries, forming a “train on the mainland, process in Hong Kong, serve the world” model to bring AI products overseas and serve international clients.