Google Cloud announces Agent Compute Engine, an isolated computer for every AI agent
Google Cloud announced Agent Compute Engine, a service that gives each AI agent its own hardware-isolated micro virtual machine that can pause while idle and resume quickly; it already runs Gemini's agents and is due in preview in the coming months.
What happened
- On October 22, 2026, at AGNTCon + MCPCon, Google Cloud introduced Agent Compute Engine, which it says already powers Gemini as an agent for work tasks.
- Each agent gets its own fast-booting microVM with a hardware-isolated boundary, short-lived credentials, and its own Hyperdisk so files and context persist across long sessions.
- Idle agents are paused through checkpoint and restore and resumed from snapshots, so customers aren't paying for idle machines, according to Google.
- Google also announced Agent Substrate, an open-source runtime for Google Kubernetes Engine; in Google's test with 200,000 agents it sustained 500 activations per second with under 500 ms suspend and resume.
- Google is extending Gemini for business agent governance to cover agents wherever they run; Agent Compute Engine is targeted for preview in the coming months.
Why it matters: As AI agents start running code and using browsers on a company's behalf, a safe, separate machine for each one becomes basic infrastructure, and Google is offering the same setup it uses for Gemini to businesses building their own agents.
Sources
- Google Cloud Blog: Introducing Agent Compute Engine cloud.google.com
- Google Cloud Blog: Agent Compute Engine deep dive cloud.google.com
Checked October 25, 2026 against the sources above. Claims about performance or benchmarks are the company's own unless stated otherwise.