Google targets AI agents’ idle-time costs with new compute service

As enterprises scale AI agents, Google is betting that idle infrastructure costs could become a major barrier to adoption. To address that challenge, the company on Thursday launched Agent Compute Engine, a service that suspends inactive agents and restores them on demand while preserving their execution state. AI agents often spend long periods waiting for instructions, tool responses, or human approvals. While enterprises can reduce costs by shutting down the underlying compute resources, restarting agents typically requires rebuilding the execution environment and restoring context, adding