Agent Compute Engine and expanded agent governance

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Blog authors: Nirav Mehta, VP Product Management; Michael Bachman, VP/GM; Kevin Hutchins, VP Product Management

Scaling Gemini to planet scale taught us firsthand that securely running autonomous agents is fundamentally an infrastructure challenge. The shift from single-turn prompting to interactive agents requires a new paradigm of execution and control. To support massive concurrent agent sessions, we engineered new compute and governance solutions for Gemini to help solve these challenges.

Today at AGNTCon + MCPCon, we are delivering these capabilities to customers by launching Agent Compute Engine, a purpose-built compute service that already powers Gemini as an agent for work tasks. It will be available in preview in the coming months, providing hardware-isolated runtime sandbox security. Additionally, we are extending Gemini for business’ agent governance capabilities to support agents wherever they operate. Together, these capabilities deliver the control you need to run, govern, and scale your agents.

Agent Compute Engine arose from the need to handle Google’s massive agentic workloads that write and execute code, run tools, drive browsers, orchestrate enterprise workflows, and iterate rapidly and at scale. While traditional compute primitives are excellent for standard workloads, they weren't optimized for the unique, highly iterative nature of AI agents.

Purpose-built for agents, Agent Compute Engine gives every Gemini agent its own high-performance, secure computer to act upon, powering Gemini's dynamic, high-churn sessions. Agent Compute Engine is optimized specifically for the unique lifecycle patterns of AI agents, and you will soon be able to use this service to power your own custom agents. Highlights include:

"Scaling the Gemini agent to planet scale requires compute that spins up rapidly and operates with extreme efficiency. Agent Compute Engine microVMs give us the responsiveness, hardware isolation, and workload density needed to deliver interactive agent sandboxes to our users around the world." - Gautham Thambidorai, VP & Google Fellow, Gemini

For platform teams looking for customization and multi-cloud portability, or who have already standardized on Kubernetes, Agent Substrate on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is an open-source execution runtime that brings the same agent-first design to Kubernetes. It’s built on a zero-trust architecture that cleanly decouples agent execution from machine management. When an agent becomes idle, Agent Substrate snapshots its active memory and returns the machine to the pool, then resumes the agent the moment it’s needed again. Because it’s open source and Kubernetes-native, you can customize it, extend it, and run it alongside your existing workloads. Some Agent Substrate highlights include:

Leading AI teams like Nous Research are already using this reliable architecture to deploy multi-tenant agents directly into existing customer infrastructure efficiently.

“We built Hermes Enterprise to enable customers to deploy into their existing infrastructure, while handling per-agent isolation and extensible access control. Agent Substrate addresses both at the platform layer in a way that also preserves valuable compute resources. Our experience with Agent Substrate gives us confidence the architecture can scale efficiently as agent workloads grow.” - Hervé Bizira, Chief Business Officer, Nous Research

As organizations transition autonomous agents from isolated pilots to multi-runtime production fleets, traditional security frameworks must be hardened and evolve. Customers face a triple challenge: securing dynamic non-deterministic interaction paths across agents, tools, models, skills and data; maintaining a default deny posture with least-privilege-access distributed runtimes; and ensuring that asynchronous agent actions can be audited. Without strong agent governance, agent sprawl quickly introduces risk — including shadow AI, data exfiltration, and agent actions that are hard to track and audit.

To solve these challenges, we built robust agent governance capabilities into Gemini platform, including:

Now as agent fleets continue to grow dramatically across diverse environments, we are extending the reach of our Gemini for business agent governance capabilities across Google Cloud runtimes, cross-cloud, on-prem and client devices to manage and secure agents everywhere they run. This includes the following capabilities:

Additionally we are announcing new agent governance capabilities to Agent Gateway to enable granular cost controls, intelligent model routing, and simplified customizations and integrations. Highlights coming this quarter in preview include:

“At L’Oréal, our ambition is to put agentic AI in the hands of our teams, empowering them to bring new ideas to life and shape the future of beauty. Through our Beauty Tech Agentic Platform, AI agents are becoming part of everyday work. Google Cloud’s agent governance provides us the foundation to scale this ambition with confidence, unifying identity, policy and observability across runtimes such as Cloud Run. Our developers can innovate faster while we maintain clear control over what each agent can access.” - Alexandre Frizzo, AI Lead Engineer, L’Oreal

The agentic era requires an evolution in how we scale infrastructure. By combining the high-performance execution of Agent Compute Engine and Agent Substrate with agent governance capabilities from Gemini for business — now expanded with cross-cloud reach — we are establishing a resilient foundation for protected, high-density AI agents.

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