The big data sector is one of 14 strategic emerging industries in North China's Shanxi province.

Shanxi has rolled out preferential policies for strategic emerging industries, attracting such big data leaders such as Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu to start operations there. 

The province was home to 1,224 high-tech enterprises in information technology in 2019, nearly six times the number of companies there in 2015. 

Shanxi's government has also supported the construction of data centers. 

As of April, the province had 377,800 standard design racks for data centers in use or being installed, as well as 3.78 million servers, an increase of 61.7 percent year-on-year.

Emerging platform companies in the big data industry have also grown rapidly in the province. 

Global Leap E-commerce Co is a leading example of one of them. It provides customized retail solutions for supermarkets and has signed data intelligence cooperation deals with 150 regional supermarkets, covering more than 400 million users in 28 provinces. Another company, Kuaicheng Logistics, uses digital technology to improve logistics efficiency and reduce the freight costs of 530,000 registered drivers. 

In addition, a number of big data service and products have sprung up. Jingying Digital Intelligent Co and tech giant Huawei have jointly worked on underground safety solutions in the mining sector, with related products and technologies now being exported to the South African and Middle Eastern markets.