Anheuser-Busch InBev has officially opened its newest brewery in China — a sign of the significance of the Chinese market to the world's largest brewer.

The company's new Putian Brewery was commissioned for operation on Dec. 6 in China's Fujian Province and will have the capacity to produce 1.5 million tons of beer a year. According to AB InBev, that makes the brewery the largest such facility by capacity in Asia Pacific.

Among the technologies employed in the plant will be production lines that can produce 160,000 cans per hour, a speed that's twice as fast as previous production lines, according to the brewer. Other technological updates will aid quality control at the facility through the use of high-speed scanning and automatic discarding of products with defects.