Google Cloud launches Agent Compute Engine with per-agent microVMs
Google Cloud announced Agent Compute Engine on October 22, 2026, giving each Gemini agent a hardware-isolated Cloud Hypervisor microVM with its own kernel, short-lived per-agent credentials injected outside the sandbox and a persistent Hyperdisk, with idle agents checkpointed and resumed. Preview is due in the coming months; the open-source Agent Substrate on GKE is available now and Google reports 500 activations per second at under 500 ms suspend-resume in a 200,000-agent benchmark.
Why it matters
It treats agent isolation and idle-cost control as first-class infrastructure rather than something developers assemble themselves.
Importance: 3/5
notable infrastructure release for agent isolation and lifecycle management