There may be more to Google LLC’s latest cloud expansion than what immediately meets the eye.

In a blog post published on Wednesday, the technology giant revealed plans to bring its infrastructure-as-a-service platform to Hong Kong sometime next year. Google already operates cloud regions in several major Asian cities, notably Tokyo, Singapore and Taiwan. Each region consists of at least two hosting sites situated in different locations to mitigate the impact of localized outages such as a power disruption.

What makes the move into Hong Kong different from Google’s previous expansions in the region is its tense history with China. The company stopped serving searches in the country seven years ago and hasn’t returned since, even as rivals started building out their local operations. Today, Microsoft Corp. and Amazon Web Services Inc. both provide cloud services to Chinese companies.

Google’s new plans could signal a tentative interest in re-entering the country. As a semi-autonomous region, Hong Kong may be a good stepping stone before an expansion into the rest of China, where Beijing’s regulatory policies have presented challenges for U.S. cloud providers. AWS was recently forced to sell some of its local hardware assets to comply with certain technology laws.

Because of these factors, any potential attempt by Google to take a shot at the Chinese market probably won’t happen in the foreseeable future. In August, a spokesperson for the company stated that it has “no plans to bring Google Cloud to China.” But a more recent Bloomberg report cited sources as saying that the Alphabet Inc. subsidiary is actively trying to foster business ties with Chinese companies.

According to the tipsters, the effort revolves around Google’s popular TensorFlow artificial intelligence engine. That’s significant is because the tech giant’s primary means of monetizing the open-source tool is a set of paid services delivered via its public cloud.

Image: Google