Google Inc said a its Quantum Artificial Intelligence team is launching a hardware initiative to design and build new quantum information processors based on superconducting electronics. Google' s research team led by physicist John Martinis from the University of California Santa Barbara will join the company to start the project.

The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab is a collaboration between Google, NASA Ames Research Center 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.

Last year, Google's artificial intelligence lab partnered with US space agency NASA on quantum computing research.