[4] The suburb of Atlantis was established by the South African apartheid government during the 1970s for the colored population of Cape Town under the Group Areas Act.

[citation needed] In 2013, the City of Cape Town, in cooperation with the Western Cape Provincial Government, declared Atlantis as a priority area for economic development, establishing a Greentech hub for manufacturing of components for the renewable energy and other green industries.

An application has also been submitted for the Atlantis Industrial Area to be declared a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) with a focus on green technology.

In the same year, Hisense opened a factory in the town in June[full citation needed], thus injecting 350 million rand into the first phase of the Atlantis plant, creating 300 production positions, and introducing a skills transfer program led by technicians and engineers from China.

[5] There have been a range of other interventions to revitalize the local economy: The biggest new investment was the GRI South Africa factory, which manufactures wind turbine towers.