Google Cloud Launches Agent Compute Engine: A Hardware-Isolated MicroVM for Every Agent, With Agent Substrate 1.0 Generally Available on GKE
Google Cloud used the AGNTCon + MCPCon event to launch Agent Compute Engine, a purpose-built compute service that already powers Gemini as an agent for work tasks. Google said the service will be available in preview in the coming months, providing hardware-isolated runtime sandbox security. Google Cloud is headquartered in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California.
Google said Agent Compute Engine arose from the need to handle its own massive agentic workloads, which write and execute code, run tools, drive browsers, orchestrate enterprise workflows and iterate rapidly and at scale. The service gives every agent its own high-performance, secure computer: microVMs boot rapidly, copy-on-write memory sharing lets multiple agents run on a single operating system template, and idle microVMs are paused via fast checkpoint and restore. On security, the service runs with Titanium, Google's offload infrastructure processing unit, delivering silicon-rooted defense-in-depth for untrusted AI agents through a hardware-isolated Cloud Hypervisor boundary with its own guest kernel and root access. Each microVM runs its agent's own identity using short-lived credentials, carries its own cryptographically verified ID, and has service credentials injected in egress outside the microVM, so credentials stay outside the sandbox. Each microVM also gets its own Hyperdisk, enabling persistence of execution workspaces and agent context.
Alongside the managed service, Google announced that Agent Substrate, gVisor and OpenRL have been accepted into the CNCF Sandbox, and that Agent Substrate has reached 1.0 and is generally available on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Google said Agent Substrate separates stateful agents from compute by snapshotting idle agents to storage and restoring them in under 500 milliseconds, achieving up to 10 times container density. Google also expanded its agent governance tools to cover agents across its own services and other environments. Gautham Thambidorai, vice president and Google Fellow for Gemini, said Agent Compute Engine microVMs give Google the responsiveness, hardware isolation and workload density needed to deliver interactive agent sandboxes to users around the world. Google listed no pricing for Agent Compute Engine in the announcement.
Source: Google Cloud
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：谷歌山景城园区。Austin McKinley 摄，CC BY 3.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: The Google campus in Mountain View, California. Photo by Austin McKinley, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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