DigitalOcean announced its AI-Native Cloud at Deploy 2026, a five-layer platform spanning silicon to agents designed for inference and agentic workloads. The stack includes owned GPU infrastructure (NVIDIA HGX B300, AMD MI350X), a preference-aware Inference Router that routes requests across 20+ models to optimize cost and latency, Firecracker-based MicroVM Droplets for agent sandboxes, managed data services extended for AI (vector databases, managed Kafka, Redis-compatible Valkey), and a Managed Agents layer with primitives for separating agent plumbing from business logic. The platform is built on open-source foundations including vLLM, LangGraph, CrewAI, and PostgreSQL. Customer examples cited include Character.AI handling 1B+ daily queries at 2x throughput and Hippocratic AI powering 20M+ patient interactions with 40% lower latency.
Table of contents
The shape of the stackInfrastructure: own the silicon, own the economicsCore Cloud: the foundation under every agentInference Engine: every model, one endpointData & Learning: AI-ready data, no rebuild requiredManaged Agents: a production runtime, not a monolithThe compounding effect of the full stackStart here. Scale here.Sort: