Google Launches Agent Compute Engine with Hardware-Isolated MicroVMs for Gemini Agents
Google announces Agent Compute Engine, using Titanium chips for hardware isolation, claiming 10x agent density per server in tests.
Google announced Agent Compute Engine on October 22, 2026, a service designed to provide each AI agent with its own hardware-isolated micro virtual machine (microVM). The service currently powers Gemini internally and will open for preview in the coming months.
According to Google, these microVMs are secured by the company's Titanium chip, enabling hardware-level isolation. When an agent idles, its VM automatically pauses to free up resources for others. Shared memory between VMs significantly reduces the cost of running individual agents. Google claims that in test environments, this technology allows a single server to host ten times as many agents. In a test involving 200,000 agents, suspend and resume operations took less than 500 milliseconds.
This efficiency addresses the high overhead traditionally associated with VMs in agentic systems. As AI agents scale, resource isolation and scheduling have become critical infrastructure bottlenecks. Google also open-sourced Agent Substrate, a Kubernetes runtime supporting this architecture. On the governance side, Google added token tracking, model routing, and support for third-party identity providers like Ping Identity and SailPoint, extending these controls to Cloud Run, GKE, and managed endpoints.