Promotion of the big data industry and development of a big data-based service industry will facilitate growth of intelligent manufacturing in the Smart Manufacturing Industrial Park and transformation and upgrading of the optoelectronic information industry in the East Lake High-tech Development Zone, and will advance the innovation-driven development and upgrading of the local economy and society. The big data industry is of great strategic significance to Wuhan's efforts to develop itself as a rejuvenated state-level central city.

The big data industry has overtaken cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and mobile Internet as the result of an in-depth combination of new generation information technology and new commercial applications like e-commerce, social networks, and smart cities. It is becoming a new hot issue and future trend of the industry, and will bring profound changes to economic and social development.

The industrial park is exploring the advantages of current information technologies like cloud computing, the Internet of Things and new broadband access and the values of data resources, hoping to build a big data industry system featuring industrial bases, technologies, enterprises and application platforms. It aims to lead domestically in this area and have its own characteristics.

In order to promote the steady and rapid development of the big data industry, by 2018 the Optics Valley Smart Manufacturing Industrial Park is expected to create a group of new technologies, products and standards that own independent intellectual property rights and have reached a domestic leading level. It also anticipates by that date having developed a number of big data platforms and demonstration projects that can absorb data resources nationwide or even worldwide; explored a raft of big data applications featuring advanced development modes, complete service systems, significant agglomeration effects, and dominant positions; attracted a number of world famous big data headquarters and leading companies in big data research and development, manufacturing, and services & operations; formed a pool of big data resources and completed industrial chains. It strives to house by 2018 a big data giant with annual turnover of 5-10 billion yuan ($724.63 million - $1.45 billion), more than two enterprises with annual turnover of 1-5 billion yuan, and one listed company, to have brought the industry’s output value to 50 billion yuan, the sales volume of related industries to 100 billion yuan, and to have built itself into a world famous and domestic first-class smart manufacturing industrial demonstration town.