Google has announced Agent Compute Engine, a service that assigns every Gemini agent its own hardware-isolated micro virtual machine. The system already powers Gemini and will open for preview in the coming months. Each agent runs inside a microVM secured by Google’s Titanium chip. When an agent idles, its VM pauses automatically to free the machine for others. Shared memory between VMs reduces the cost for each one to run. Virtual machines represent a major cost factor when providing agentic systems, so Google is targeting efficiency here. This technology also underpins the open-sourced Agent Substrate, a Kubernetes runtime that Google claims can fit ten times as many agents on a single server. In a test with 200,000 agents, suspend and resume operations took less than 500 milliseconds. On the oversight side, Google is adding token tracking, model routing, and support for third-party identity providers like Ping Identity and SailPoint. Those controls will extend to Cloud Run, GKE, and managed endpoints.
- Agents pause automatically when idle to free resources.
- Shared memory lowers the cost per virtual machine.
- Identity support includes Ping Identity and SailPoint.
