Berlin (Photo credit: Sam Shead)Sam Shead
Google’s new Berlin office, launched on Tuesday by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, contains a number of artificial intelligence researchers and engineers.
The search giant said in a press release that the office is home to “some AI researchers working on basic research and the application of artificial intelligence, especially deep learning.”
Google has over 1,400 employees across four German offices, including a German headquarters in Hamburg and a development center in Munich.
Tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have opened up offices around the world to help them reach more customers and more potential staff. The ongoing AI talent war makes overseas offices particularly useful when it comes to hiring.
Google’s new Berlin office, which can accommodate up to 300 people, is located on Berlin’s Museum Island in the centre of the city. It will contain the most modern “YouTube Space in Europe,” Google said.
The office will initially be home to around 130 Googlers working on Sales, Cloud, Google Play, Policy, Google for Startups and YouTube. It’s unclear how many of the staff will be working on AI exclusively and Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“It’s an exciting time to be Googler in Berlin,” said Pichai. “The city has long been a capital of culture and the media, more and more it is also becoming a center of the start-up scene and a driver of innovation. With this new office space, we can more than double the number of Googlers who work here in Berlin.”
Google faced some resistance in Berlin recent;y when it tried to open a new startup hub in Kreuzberg — a part of Berlin that is typically anti-gentrification. The plans for the startup hub were eventually cancelled.