The Cloud Was Built in 2005 – AI Agents Need Something Different

01 /The Concept

Cloud hosting platforms were built about twenty years ago – and their architecture was never designed for AI agents. You can technically cram AI agents into existing cloud infrastructure with enough workarounds but in the coming decade, billions or even trillions of agents will need to run at scale. The current "duct-tape" approach won't hold.

Blaxel is building a cloud service purpose-designed from the ground up for developing and hosting AI agents.

Developers can build agents on Blaxel from scratch or choose from a catalog of agent templates for common enterprise use cases: knowledge base assistants, user support agents, deep research tools, and others.

Every agent can be connected directly to GitHub, eliminating manual code transfers to the cloud. Developers can test and debug agents in isolated local sandboxes before they're accessible to end users. The platform maintains version history for every agent, so rolling back to a previous stable build is always available.

Blaxel provides a unified interface that lets any agent call any of hundreds of available AI models via a simple toggle – no code changes required. Built-in analytics track the performance and cost of running each agent against different models, helping developers pick the optimal model for each use case.

The same standardized approach applies to connecting agents to private and public knowledge bases and MCP servers. A library of pre-configured MCP servers and third-party service integrations is ready to use out of the box.

Each agent runs in its own virtual machine, with compute resources adjustable with a single toggle based on load – so hosting costs scale precisely with actual demand.

Blaxel just graduated from Y Combinator and published its launch on the YC site.

02 /Why It Matters

As one developer newsletter put it: "AI agents are storming the cloud." And cloud providers are gradually adapting – adding agent-specific features on top of existing infrastructure. But that infrastructure was built for different workloads, and the adaptation is awkward. Major cloud providers will eventually build proper agent-native services internally. The question is when.

In the meantime, while the agent hosting market is genuinely unsettled, there's a window to get in with a specialized product. The real question is: where and how?

A recent review covered JobForAgent ([related review](/review/milliard-dollarov-budet-stoit-ne-jeto-a-vot-jeto)), which built a marketplace for AI agents. Its site describes a broader vision of the infrastructure challenges it'll need to solve as that marketplace grows. One of them is hosting: agents on the marketplace need to run reliably and fast. Without that, the marketplace is a toy, not a business tool anyone will pay for.

JobForAgent could build its own hosting layer. But why? That's a distraction from the core product. It would be far easier to license or directly use an existing, reliable AI agent hosting platform. Blaxel is positioned to be that platform.

Another AI agent marketplace – Agent.ai ([reviewed here](/review/interesno-a-kak-kompanii-budut-nanimat-ii-sotrudnikov-i-ii-frilanserov)), built by HubSpot's former CTO – has crossed one million users in under six months and faces the same infrastructure question.

Those are just two examples. The number of general and vertical AI agent marketplaces will multiply significantly. With a trillion agents expected to exist, they need to be listed, discovered, and deployed somewhere. It strains credibility to assume one or two global marketplaces will serve the whole planet.

Extend the logic further: virtually every SaaS company will be building AI agents alongside or in place of traditional web services. Many will have multiple agents. Those agents need to be hosted somewhere.

And SaaS companies that maintain third-party developer ecosystems will see those developers shift from building plugins to building agents. Those agents also need hosting.

Companies of all sizes will be spinning up agents as well, many of them using no-code agent-building platforms. But those no-code platforms will themselves need reliable, scalable hosting for the agents their customers create.

03 /Opportunities

The prospect of a trillion AI agents brings to mind the old observation that during a gold rush, you're better off selling shovels than digging for gold.

But with one important addendum: even better than selling shovels is manufacturing them – so you can sell to the people who are selling shovels to the miners.

In concrete terms: if AI agents are about to flood the market, then an agent hosting platform may be more valuable when sold not to individual agent developers but to the companies building platforms for agent developers – so those companies don't have to solve the hosting problem themselves.

While those companies are still cobbling together hosting solutions on the fly, there's an opening to show up with something turnkey: simple, reliable, and built to scale from day one.

This window is open now because the market is genuinely in flux. Later may be too late. Timing matters here.