BEIJING, April 3 (Xinhua) -- Artificial intelligence and big data, two technologies China is avidly embracing, will drive a renaissance in hardware development and investment, said a report on Wednesday's China Daily.

China is working on new ways to improve chip performance, power and costs for AI applications, which will present huge opportunities for companies laying the foundations for such technological breakthroughs, said Gary Dickerson, president and chief executive officer of Applied Materials Inc, a leading semiconductor and display equipment company.

The US-based company's sales hit 5.1 billion U.S. dollars last year in China, tripling from 2015 to 2018. And that figure represented 30 percent, or the largest proportion, of revenue worldwide.

According to Dickerson, AI and big data have the potential to transform entire industries and create trillions of dollars of economic value. But that also poses challenges for infrastructure makers, because building global AI infrastructure using current technology requires excessive energy consumption.

Both China and the United States have tremendous strengths that can contribute to accelerating the promise of the AI-big data era.