Google announced Agent Compute Engine, a compute service built for AI agents, at AGNTCon + MCPCon on October 22, 2026, and extended its agent governance tools beyond Google Cloud. Customers cannot use Agent Compute Engine yet: Google says "It will be available in preview in the coming months." Agent Gateway already works for agents on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, while other governance pieces are "in preview soon."

#What changed?

Agent Compute Engine. Google describes it as "a purpose-built compute service that already powers Gemini as an agent for work tasks." That claim is Google's. Google says each agent gets its own hardware-isolated microVM that boots quickly, and that idle microVMs are paused "via fast checkpoint and restore" and resumed from snapshots, so an agent waiting on a person does not hold a running machine. Each microVM also gets its own Hyperdisk for persistent workspaces.

Google's deep dive says the service was built to handle its own workloads, "powering Gemini, Gemini platform, Antigravity, and our internal model evaluation and reinforcement learning pipelines at planet scale."

Security is the main pitch. Google says: "A microVM never holds user credentials, API keys, OAuth refresh tokens, or cloud service account keys in its memory or on its disk." Instead, service credentials are injected outside the microVM, and each microVM gets a short-lived identity based on the open SPIFFE standard. Google runs it with Titanium, its offload processor, and says the host uses "a read-only root filesystem enforced via dm-verity with zero persistent local state." Google has published no price, though it says "you don’t pay for idle VMs."

Agent governance, extended. Google says it is "extending the reach of our Gemini for business agent governance capabilities across Google Cloud runtimes, cross-cloud, on-prem and client devices." The existing tools are:

  • Agent Gateway, which Google calls "the air traffic controller for client-to-agent and agents-to-anywhere traffic."
  • Agent Registry, a central list of approved agents, tools, MCP servers, skills, models and endpoints.
  • Agent Identity, a SPIFFE-based ID for each agent.
  • Agent observability, with OpenTelemetry-compliant metrics, logs and traces.

The cross-cloud version uses lightweight Envoy-based enforcement points that, per Google's docs, can run on clusters such as Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, Red Hat OpenShift or your own data centers. Device governance covers coding agents such as Claude Code and Antigravity CLI on managed devices.

Agent Substrate is not new. Google's announcement also points Kubernetes teams to Agent Substrate, an existing open-source runtime. Google announced its availability on GKE in a September 15, 2026 post. The code is on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, linked from Google's announcement, and the README calls it "pre-1.0." Google says Substrate "delivers as much as 10x higher compute density compared to traditional compute" and, in a 200,000-agent benchmark, "sustained 500 activations per second at less than 500 ms suspend and resume latency." These are Google's figures.

#Who can use it and when?

Product

Status, in Google's words

Agent Compute Engine

"available in preview in the coming months" (interest form only)

Agent Gateway on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform

"currently available"

Agent Gateway for GKE and Cloud Run

"coming soon" (docs)

Cross-cloud and on-prem governance

"in preview soon"

Governance for agents on managed devices

"in preview soon"

New Agent Gateway features

"coming this quarter in preview"

Agent Substrate on GKE

"available to all GKE customers for non-production workloads"; production GA "via allowlist"

The Agent Gateway docs say: "Agent Gateway is currently available for agents running on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform." Support for GKE, Cloud Run and cross-cloud environments "will be available soon through an early preview."

The Agent Gateway features "coming this quarter in preview" include token management for attributing spend and setting budget guardrails, model routing policies, Service Extensions bindings, delegated user authorization through Ping Identity, SailPoint and Saviynt, and Express Link for Cloud Run.

Pricing. Google has not priced Agent Compute Engine. Per the GKE docs, "Agent Substrate on GKE is offered at no extra charge. GKE pricing applies to the resources that you create."

#How to get it

  1. Agent Compute Engine: register interest through the form linked from Google's announcement. There is no preview to join yet.
  2. Agent Gateway: use it with agents running on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.
  3. Agent Substrate: install it from the GitHub repository. On GKE, the docs say "you can install Agent Substrate on GKE only in GKE Standard clusters. Autopilot clusters aren't supported." Use it for non-production workloads unless Google adds you to the production allowlist.

#How does it compare?

The New Stack notes that "Startups like E2B and Daytona offer them to developers (and support them on any cloud), as does AWS with Bedrock AgentCore," referring to agent sandboxes, and that "AgentCore also gives every agent session its own microVM." SiliconANGLE describes Agent Compute Engine as "an infrastructure service optimized to host artificial intelligence agents."

Keeping secrets out of the sandbox targets a real risk: see our coverage of the LiteLLM 1.107.0 compromise, which targeted cloud and AI credentials. For another vendor's approach to agent controls, see Microsoft's agentic insider security controls. Agent Registry also governs MCP servers; see our MCP reference servers v2 story.

#What is still unclear?

  • A preview date and price for Agent Compute Engine. Google says only "in the coming months."
  • Launch stages for Agent Registry, Agent Identity and observability: the pages we read give no GA label.
  • Device governance. Google's blog says "in preview soon," but its Agent Endpoint docs are written as if the feature is in preview.
  • Substrate governance. Google says it will integrate Substrate with its governance framework "Looking ahead," with no date.