Google introduces Agent Compute Engine, a microVM for each agent

On October 22, Google Cloud announced Agent Compute Engine at AGNTCon. It is not another chat model. It is the compute service Google says already runs Gemini's agents for work tasks.

Each agent gets its own microVM, isolated in hardware with Google's Titanium chip and its own guest kernel. When the agent is idle, waiting on a person or another system, the microVM can be snapshotted and paused, then restored. Google's point is that agents start, stop, and resume constantly, and ordinary virtual machines are too heavy and too expensive for that pattern.

The customer preview is scheduled for the coming months. What shipped today is an account of how Google runs Gemini, plus a plan to open the same service to other agents. The same day, Google said it will extend Gemini for business agent governance to more places agents run.

Once an agent writes code, drives a browser, and calls tools, isolation and pause-resume become infrastructure, not just a prompting problem.