Google Cloud’s new Agent Compute Engine provides hardware-isolated microVMs for AI agents, ensuring secure, credential-free execution with high performance and density.
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Google Cloud has announced Agent Compute Engine, a compute service built specifically for AI agents. Google Agent Compute Engine gives each agent its own hardware-isolated microVM. The sandbox holds zero credentials. The service already powers Gemini as an agent for work tasks. Google unveiled it this week at AGNTCon + MCPCon. Customer preview is targeted for the coming months. The pitch: VM-grade isolation with container-like speed and density. TL;DR Unit: One hardware-isolated microVM per agent session, with its own guest kernel, root access and Hyperdisk. Runs on: Google-managed hosts using Titan silicon and the Titanium IPU. Open-source sibling Agent Substrate runs on any Kubernetes cluster. Performance: Idle agents are checkpointed to zero active resources and resumed from snapshots. Google gives no ACE boot or density numbers. Best: Agent Substrate hit 500 activations/s at under 500 ms suspend/resume across 200,000 agents. Worst: No published boot time, density, pricing or preview date for Agent Compute Engine itself. What is Google Agent Compute Engine? Agent Compute Engine is a Google Cloud service that runs each AI agent inside a dedicated microVM. Per the technical post, it powers Gemini, Antigravity, and internal evaluation and RL pipelines. Google splits every agent into 2 parts. The harness, or ‘brain,’ calls the model. The sandbox, or ‘hands,’ runs code, shell commands and browsers. The harness runs fully outside the sandbox and dispatches explicit commands into it. How does the microVM isolation work? Each session runs in a single-tenant microVM behind a Cloud Hypervisor boundary. Hosts are stateless appliances with a read-only root filesystem enforced by dm-verity. Titanium holds attestation keys outside the guest. The networking design is the unusual part: MicroVMs have no standard network interface, no default gateway and no direct VPC access. All traffic crosses a virtio-vsock boundary to a local proxy, then to an external gateway.
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