Google Cloud announced Agent Compute Engine (ACE) on October 22, 2026, saying it already powers Gemini agents that handle work tasks. The company described customer preview as expected in the coming months. ACE is a purpose-built compute service; Agent Substrate, announced separately, is an open-source runtime built for Kubernetes teams.
How Agent Compute Engine is designed to run agents
Google describes ACE as running agents in rapidly starting microVMs, or small virtual machines with hardware isolation. Copy-on-write memory sharing lets instances use a common operating-system template and copy data when it changes. When an agent is idle, checkpoint and restore can pause its microVM and later resume it from a snapshot.
Google also says each microVM has its own identity and persistent Hyperdisk workspace for agent context. It describes a Cloud Hypervisor boundary, a guest kernel and root access, with Titanium supporting silicon-rooted defense in depth. The company says credentials are short-lived and service credentials are injected as traffic leaves the microVM.
Agent Compute Engine and Agent Substrate serve different needs
ACE is Google’s purpose-built compute service, while Agent Substrate is an open-source, Kubernetes-native runtime. Google presents Agent Substrate as an option for platform teams seeking customization or portability, and says it works with any Kubernetes cluster and agent framework or harness. The announcement describes ACE as supporting custom agents but does not make the same broad framework-compatibility claim for it.
| Offering | Role | Execution model | Stated fit | Timing described by Google |
| Agent Compute Engine | Purpose-built compute service for agents | Hardware-isolated microVMs, copy-on-write memory sharing, and checkpoint and restore | Google says it already powers Gemini work-task agents | Customer preview expected in the coming months |
| Agent Substrate | Open-source, Kubernetes-native runtime | Pooled Kubernetes compute, memory snapshots for idle agents, and sandbox options including microVM or gVisor | Customization and portability; Google says it supports any Kubernetes cluster and agent framework or harness | Google said teams can try it on GKE |
For a platform team already working with Kubernetes, Agent Substrate’s stated portability and framework support are the more relevant distinctions. ACE’s announcement instead focuses on managed, isolated microVMs and their lifecycle. Google cited Nous Research as using Agent Substrate to deploy multi-tenant agents into existing customer infrastructure.
What Google reported about the Agent Substrate benchmark
Google reported that a validation involving 200,000 agents sustained 500 activations per second, with suspend-and-resume latency below 500 milliseconds. Separately, the company claimed up to 10× compute density compared with “traditional compute.” Those figures describe Agent Substrate, not ACE.
Google’s agent-governance plans span more environments
Google named four parts of its agent-governance offering: Agent Gateway, Agent Registry, Agent Identity and agent observability. The Gateway handles traffic between clients and agents and from agents to other services, with policy and security controls. The Registry catalogs approved agents, tools, MCP servers, skills, models and endpoints. Agent Identity assigns each agent a secure ID based on SPIFFE, while OpenTelemetry-compliant observability covers metrics, logs and traces for model calls, tool use and agent hops.
Google also described broader governance across Google Cloud, cross-cloud and on-premises environments, as well as managed endpoints. The company said cross-cloud and hybrid policy enforcement, plus governance for local agents on managed devices, were coming to preview soon. It said additional Agent Gateway features, including cost controls and model routing, were expected in preview this quarter. L’Oréal AI lead Alexandre Frizzo described the company’s use of Google Cloud governance across runtimes such as Cloud Run.
