Google Cloud Launches Agent Compute Engine, a Hardware-Isolated Sandbox per Gemini Agent
Summary
Google Cloud launches Agent Compute Engine, a microVM service giving each Gemini agent a hardware-isolated sandbox, with preview in the coming months. The company says idle agents pause through checkpoint and restore. Its open-source Agent Substrate on GKE claims 10x compute density and 500 activations per second in a 200,000-agent benchmark.
Key Points
- Agent Compute Engine runs on Titanium, Google's offload IPU, giving silicon-rooted isolation for untrusted agent code.
- Each microVM carries its own Hyperdisk, letting agents persist execution workspaces and context across long-running sessions.
- Gautham Thambidorai, VP and Google Fellow at Gemini, says the microVMs give the responsiveness, hardware isolation and workload density for global agent sandboxes.