Southwest China's Guizhou Province, the country's first comprehensive big data pilot area, has set an annual growth target of about 10 percent for its digital economy this year, according to a recently released action plan.

The province also plans to invest 12 billion yuan (about 1.7 billion U.S. dollars) in information infrastructure and 9.2 billion yuan in key digital economy projects in 2020.

Guizhou's number of enterprises in the digital economy is expected to reach 40,000 by year-end, the action plan said.

Hu Jianhua, deputy head of the provincial big data development administration, said Guizhou will continue to provide cloud services for enterprises and promote the intelligent transformation and digitalization of phosphorus chemicals, liquor, coal and other traditional industries.

Guizhou has stepped up efforts to promote big data development in recent years. As a batch of projects including Huawei and Tencent data centers have been built and put into operation, the number of major data centers in the province has increased to 17.