AWS, Microsoft and Google agree the session is the new unit of compute. They disagree on how to isolate it.
Over the past few months, four AI giants quietly rebuilt the same thing at once: AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic The post AWS, Microsoft and Google agree the session is the new unit of compute. They disagree on how to isolate it. appeared first on The New Stack .
Major cloud providers and AI developers are converging on a new unit of compute ('session') due to the evolving demands and architecture of AI workloads, driven by agentic systems and complex, stateful interactions.
This development indicates a fundamental shift in how cloud infrastructure is designed and priced for AI, impacting cost, performance, and vendor lock-in for AI applications.
The abstract unit of computation for AI is moving beyond simple function calls or containers to more stateful, persistent 'sessions,' requiring new isolation and management paradigms.
- · AWS
- · Microsoft
- · Anthropic
- · Legacy cloud users without AI-optimized architectures
- · Smaller cloud providers slow to adapt AI compute primitives
Cloud providers will release new compute products and pricing models specifically for AI sessions.
Developers will build increasingly complex and stateful AI agentic systems enabled by these new primitives, leading to more sophisticated applications.
The competition around AI session isolation and management could lead to deeper vendor lock-in and differentiated AI development ecosystems.
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