Google Cloud unveiled Agent Compute Engine on Thursday at the AGNTCon and MCPCon events. It is a compute service built specifically for running AI agents at scale, with each workload inside a hardware-isolated microVM that gets its own dedicated guest kernel and root access.

The isolation is the point: agents run code, call tools, and touch data on behalf of users, so Google is leaning on its Titanium IPU technology for added protection. The service is tuned for fast churn — agents can start quickly, pause, and resume later.

Its density trick is copy-on-write memory sharing: agents starting from the same base share memory until one changes something, which Google says has delivered benchmarks of 10 times the density on the same hardware. Google frames the service as part of its Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, with security and governance for agents at the center.