Google said a research team led by physicist John Martinis from the University of California Santa Barbara will join the company to start a project to build new quantum information processors based on superconducting electronics.

The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab is a collaboration between Google, NASA Ames Research Centre and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) to study the application of quantum optimization related to artificial intelligence.

“With an integrated hardware group, the Quantum AI team will now be able to implement and test new designs for quantum optimization and inference processors based on recent theoretical insights as well as our learnings from the D-Wave quantum annealing architecture,” Google’s director of engineering, Hartmut Neven, said on its research blog.

Google, which is working on projects including self-driving cars and robots, has become increasingly focused on artificial intelligence in recent years.

Earlier in January, Google acquired privately held artificial intelligence company DeepMind Technologies .

Reuters