The VM Boom For AI Agents | David Crawshaw Co-Founder & CEO, exe.dev
What happens when AI agents stop simply answering questions and start using computers of their own?
It could create an entirely new boom in virtual machines.
In this episode of Uplink, David Crawshaw, Co-Founder and CEO of exe.dev, joins host Michael Reid to explore the infrastructure behind the rapidly emerging world of AI agents.
As agents become capable of writing code, running applications, operating tools, maintaining state, and working independently, they need more than access to an AI model. They need computing environments where they can actually get work done.
That changes the infrastructure equation.
David explores why persistent and isolated virtual machines could become a fundamental building block for agentic AI, how infrastructure needs to evolve when software starts provisioning resources for itself, and why traditional assumptions about cloud computing may need another rethink.
exe.dev is building around this idea with persistent Linux VMs designed for developers and AI agents, providing real isolation, storage, networking, SSH access, and environments agents can return to over time.
This episode covers:
⚫️ 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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Chapters:
00:00 Welcome And David’s Background
02:20 The Opus 4.5 Coding Shift
05:50 Freedom Versus Safety For Agents
10:30 Compute Pools And Memory Optimization
14:50 Three Customer Types Using Xe.dev
18:30 Pricing Without Charging Per VM
21:40 Handling 100x Demand Surges
23:30 Code Review Breaks And QA Becomes The Bottleneck
27:00 Who Should Try exe.dev