Construction of a materials laboratory started Monday in the city of Dongguan in southern China's Guangdong Province.

With an estimated budget of 12 billion yuan (around 1.7 billion U.S. dollars), the lab will cover an area of 80 hectares, consisting of main bodies such as public technology platforms, large-scale scientific facilities, innovative factories and an interdisciplinary science center.

To solve the problem of high-end material demand in the fields such as information, energy, life and health and aerospace, the lab will carry out long-term, sustained and interdisciplinary basic research on the frontier of materials science.

It was jointly built by the government of Dongguan, Institute of Physics and Institute of High Energy Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).

"Whoever grasps materials can grasp the future. The lab will endeavor to make breakthroughs in key and core technologies," said Wang Enge, an academician with CAS.

Chen Dongmin, executive deputy director of the lab, said the lab has so far attracted 18 high-level research teams focusing on areas including high-temperature materials, new energy materials and new medical materials.

"In terms of results transformation, we hope to attract enterprises from the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, which can help promote the scientific achievement to the market in a faster way," Chen said.