Google LLC can’t operate its signature search engine in China, but that’s not stopping it from pursuing another tech initiative in the country: artificial intelligence.

The search giant today said it’s opening a research center in China, several months after it was advertising to hire AI and machine learning experts there. It made the announcement of its Google AI China Center, its first such center in Asia, at its Google Developer Days event in Shanghai.

In a blog post by Fei-Fei Li, who joined as chief scientist of Google Cloud AI and Machine Learning last year, the company noted that many top of the field’s top experts are in China, and Chinese authors contributed close to half the content in the top 100 AI journals as of two years ago.

The new center will have a team of AI researchers in Beijing, some of which it has already hired. The research will be led by Li, herself a well-known figure in the field from leading Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, with Jia Li, head of research and development at Google Cloud AI and former head of research at Snap Inc. The researchers will also work with other Google AI researchers around the world, including London, Zurich, Toronto and New York.

“Besides publishing its own work, the Google AI China Center will also support the AI research community by funding and sponsoring AI conferences and workshops, and working closely with the vibrant Chinese AI research community,” she said in the post. “We want to work with the best AI talent, wherever that talent is … The science of AI has no borders, neither do its benefits.”

Google’s search and most of its other services such as Gmail were blocked following the company’s refusal to censor its content in 2010, four years after it entered the country on more friendly terms. But Google had found a cyberattack in China that targeted in and many other companies, and in the process of looking into the attack, it discovered that the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists had been hacked.

Although Google then routed its Chinese traffic to the uncensored version of its search engine in Hong Kong, that move prompted the Chinese government to block Google services.

But AI and machine learning are becoming central to all kinds of products, from cloud services to smart speakers, so Google — whose Chief Executive Sundar Pichai now calls it an “AI first” company — has been trying to push use of its TensorFlow AI tools in China. That followed earlier moves to ease back into China on a number of fronts, including making its Translate app available there in March.

In early December, according to Reuters, Pichai appeared at a conference run by the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s top internet regulator, to talk about the potential of AI. Earlier this year, in Wuzhen, China, Google’s AlphaGo AI beat No. 1 Go player Ke Jie at the Future of Go Summit.

Google is still looking for more machine learning researchers and engineers, judging from job openings listed in China. It faces considerable competition for talent from the likes of Baidu Inc., Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., which are all focused in advancing their AI capabilities as well.

Photo: Google