Google Cloud unveils Agent Compute Engine for AI agents

Google Cloud has a new home for AI agents, and it comes with locks on every door. The company unveiled Agent Compute Engine on October 22, 2026, at the AGNTCon + MCPCon events. It is a compute service built specifically for running AI agents at scale. What Google actually built At its core, Agent Compute Engine runs workloads inside hardware-isolated microVMs. Each one gets a dedicated guest kernel and root access. That isolation matters because agents do things. They run code, call tools and touch data on behalf of users. Google says the service is tuned for the fast churn and heavy demands typical of agent workloads. In practice, that means agents can start quickly, pause, and then resume later. The density trick and the security layer The second headline feature is copy-on-write memory sharing. If many agents start from the same base, they can share the same memory until one of them changes something. Only then does that agent get its own private copy of the altered part. Google says this approach has delivered benchmarks of 10x density, meaning the company claims it can pack far more agents onto the same hardware than it otherwise could. On the security side, Google is leaning ...