Google Cloud has launched Agent Compute Engine (ACE), a compute service that gives every AI agent its own hardware-isolated microVM with zero credentials inside. Unveiled this week at AGNTCon + MCPCon, the service already powers Gemini as an agent for work tasks, and a customer preview is targeted for the coming months.
Google Cloud Agent Compute Engine concept art (Credits: MarkTechPost)
The pitch is simple: VM-grade isolation with container-like speed and density. Each agent session runs in a single-tenant microVM behind a Cloud Hypervisor boundary, with its own guest kernel, root access and Hyperdisk — hosted on Google-managed infrastructure using Titan silicon and the Titanium IPU.
How Agent Compute Engine Keeps AI Agents Secure
Google splits every agent into two parts: the harness, or “brain,” which calls the model, and the sandbox, or “hands,” which runs code, shell commands and browsers. The harness runs fully outside the sandbox and dispatches explicit commands into it.
The microVMs have no standard network interface, no default gateway and no direct VPC access — all traffic crosses a virtio-vsock boundary to a local proxy. Google assumes an attacker controls everything inside the sandbox, so a prompt-injected agent finds no secrets to steal: guests get only a session-scoped SPIFFE certificate and a short-lived identity token, with real backend credentials swapped in by the Agent Gateway only after policy checks.
Agent Compute Engine Performance and Preview
Idle agents are a resource problem Google solved by checkpointing dormant microVMs to zero active resources, resumed from snapshots on the next call. Density comes from copy-on-write memory sharing: pre-warmed snapshot images are mapped so microVMs on a host share base OS and library pages, with only each agent’s modified pages consuming private memory. The open-source sibling, Agent Substrate — which runs on any Kubernetes cluster — hit 500 activations per second at under 500ms suspend/resume across 200,000 agents in testing. Google has not yet published boot times, density numbers, pricing or an exact preview date for ACE itself.
Also Read: Claude Duet Is Anthropic’s Big Bet On AI Agents For Professionals And Small Businesses and OpenAI Wants One Set of Safety Rules for Every Platform Distributing Its AI
Source: MarkTechPost — read the full story there.
