HANGZHOU, Aug. 15 (Xinhua) -- The eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou put an industrial internet demonstration zone into operation Wednesday.

The China (Hangzhou) Industrial Internet Town has a floor space of 260,000 square meters for the first stage. It was designed to eventually have a floor space of 780,000 square meters.

The town aims to attract service providers in the fields of 5G, software, industrial apps, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and big data to become an industry cluster in the Yangtze River Delta region.

Early settlers exceed 20, including the supET Industrial Internet Platform developed by Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group.

The town plans to bring in 45 service providers along the whole industrial chain and develop eight industrial internet platforms in the next three years. The efforts are expected to help achieve digital transformation at more than 100 large enterprises and over 1,000 small-and medium-sized ones.

Industrial internet is a cornerstone in the new round of industrial revolution and smart manufacturing, said Zhang Zhenfeng, a member of the standing committee of the Communist Party of China Hangzhou Municipal Committee.

Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang Province, has put forth enormous efforts on developing the digital economy and industrial internet platforms in recent years to join in the Yangtze River Delta integration and spur the economic growth of the country's east, Zhang said.

The city, home to Alibaba's headquarters, saw industrial output of the core industries of its digital economy grow by 15.5 percent year on year to 175.6 billion yuan (about 25 billion U.S. dollars) in the first half of 2019, accounting for one fourth of its gross domestic product.