Google Cloud introduced Agent Compute Engine at AGNTCon + MCPCon, providing each AI agent session with a hardware-isolated microVM secured by Titan silicon and Titanium IPUs. Built to power Gemini and internal execution pipelines, the platform eliminates in-sandbox credentials by routing traffic through Agent Gateway for in-flight token swapping. Idle microVMs checkpoint to zero active resources, leveraging copy-on-write memory sharing to achieve suspend and resume times under 500 milliseconds in 200,000-agent benchmarks.
MicroVM isolation and sandbox architecture
- ▪Google splits every AI agent session into an external harness that calls models and an internal sandbox microVM that executes shell commands, code, and browser actions
- ▪Google Agent Compute Engine microVMs run on stateless Google-managed hosts using Titan silicon, Titanium IPUs, read-only root filesystems, and Cloud Hypervisor boundaries
- ▪Google Agent Compute Engine splits storage into disposable scratch overlays, shared read-only volumes, and persistent user workspaces hosted on Hyperdisk
- ▪Agent Compute Engine microVMs lack default gateways, standard network interfaces, and direct VPC access, routing all traffic over a virtio-vsock boundary to a local proxy
MicroVM state and snapshotting
- ▪Google Agent Compute Engine checkpoints idle microVMs to zero active resources when an agent's tool calls finish and resumes them via copy-on-write memory sharing using pre-warmed snapshot images
- ▪Google Agent Compute Engine gives agent harnesses capabilities for cloning, snapshotting, forking, rewind, and rollback
Identity handling and credential security
- ▪Google Agent Gateway receives short-lived identity tokens from Agent Compute Engine microVM sandboxes and dynamically swaps in real backend credentials in flight after conducting policy checks
- ▪Google Agent Compute Engine defines four workload identities, holding zero real credentials inside the microVM sandbox and providing only a short-lived SPIFFE certificate
Agent Substrate runtime and benchmarks
- ▪In a 200,000-agent benchmark, Agent Substrate achieved 500 activations per second, suspend/resume times under 500 milliseconds, and over 1,000 dormant agents per host
- ▪Google released Agent Substrate as an open-source Kubernetes-native runtime on GKE, supporting Cloud Hypervisor microVMs and gVisor sandboxes
Agent governance expansion and roadmap
- ▪Google's Agent Compute Engine governance roadmap includes introducing delegated authorization with Saviynt and governance support for local coding tools including Claude Code and Antigravity CLI
- ▪Google is expanding agent governance across Cloud Run, GKE, and Agent Sandboxes with token tracking, model routing, Envoy-based enforcement points, and third-party identity integration with Ping Identity and SailPoint
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