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The VM Boom For AI Agents
David Crawshaw, Co-Founder and CEO of exe.dev, joins Michael Reid to explore why the rise of AI agents could trigger a new boom in virtual machines.
AI agents don’t just need intelligence. They need somewhere to work.
In this episode of Uplink, David Crawshaw, Co-Founder and CEO of exe.dev, joins Michael Reid to explore why the rise of AI agents could trigger a new boom in virtual machines. As agents move from answering questions to writing code, running applications, using tools, and completing long-running tasks, the infrastructure underneath them starts to matter a lot more.
David unpacks why persistent, isolated computing environments are becoming increasingly important for agentic AI, what traditional cloud infrastructure gets wrong for this new generation of workloads, and why the humble VM may be finding a completely new purpose in the AI era.
exe.dev itself is built around persistent Linux VMs designed for developers and agents, with isolation, networking, storage, and agent-friendly environments as core parts of the platform.
David unpacks why persistent, isolated computing environments are becoming increasingly important for agentic AI, what traditional cloud infrastructure gets wrong for this new generation of workloads, and why the humble VM may be finding a completely new purpose in the AI era.
exe.dev itself is built around persistent Linux VMs designed for developers and agents, with isolation, networking, storage, and agent-friendly environments as core parts of the platform.
In this episode, you'll hear:
- Why AI agents could drive a new boom in virtual machines.
- Why agents need more than an LLM to perform useful work.
- The importance of persistent environments for long-running agents.
- How VMs can provide isolation for increasingly capable AI systems.
- What happens when AI agents begin provisioning infrastructure themselves.
- Why the economics of compute may change when one user can operate dozens—or potentially hundreds—of agent environments.
- How the cloud infrastructure stack could evolve around agentic AI.
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