Google and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) are partnering on a super-fast “quantum” computer chip with the potential to dramatically alter the supercomputing landscape with its power and speed.

The search giant announced Tuesday that renowned researcher John Martinis and his team at the University of California, Santa Barbara, would become the newest members of the Quantum Artificial Intelligence team. Hartmut Neven, Google’s director of engineering, wrote that the new hires are part of a “hardware initiative to design and build new quantum information processors based on superconducting electronics.”

Martinis, a physics professor at UCSB credited with pioneering advances in quantum computing, told the Wall Street Journal he will become a joint employee of Google and UCSB as will about 20 of his team members.

Google was one of the first companies to invest in D-Wave’s “quantum computing” technology, even while its quantum-ness was under dispute. In May 2013, Google launched the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab with partners NASA Ames Research Center and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA). The lab houses a D-Wave Two Computer backed by the 509-qubit Vesuvius 6 (V6) processor, which the team is using to explore optimization problems that are beyond the purview of traditional supercomputers.

“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,” stated Neven.

Earlier this year, the UCSB team created an experimental system based on a superconducting multi-qubit processor, demonstrating unprecedented levels of reliability. The architecture was representative of a “universal quantum computer,” one that can handle many different kinds of algorithms. This stands in contrast to quantum annealing machines, like D-Wave’s, which are limited to optimization type problems. In the Wall Street Journal piece, Martinis said he considered his work to be “complementary … to what D-Wave is doing.”

According to Neven, Google will continue to collaborate with D-Wave scientists and to experiment with the D-Wave machine, which is scheduled to be upgraded to a 1,000 qubit ‘Washington’ processor.