# AWS ships next-gen AgentCore Runtime with elastic memory and 2-second cold starts

_Published Friday, September 18, 2026 at 12:18 PM EDT · AI, Infrastructure · Developing · Tier 2 — Notable_

AWS announced general availability of a next-generation AgentCore Runtime, the serverless microVM compute layer inside Amazon Bedrock AgentCore.

The company said the new runtime reclaims unused session memory instead of holding it at peak, so billing tracks actual usage, and that it prepares an agent environment once, snapshots it, and restores that snapshot for each new instance. AWS reported a P75 cold start of 1.9 to 2.0 seconds for container images from 200 MB to 2 GB, against 5.4 to 30 seconds with the prior version.

The runtime is available in us-east-1, us-east-2, us-west-2, eu-west-1 and ap-northeast-1; developers opt in by setting platformVersion to V2.

## Sources

- [AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/09/new-agentcore-runtime-generally-available)
- [AWS Machine Learning Blog](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/the-new-agentcore-runtime-elastic-optimized-and-consistently-fast-starts/)

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Canonical: https://techandbusiness.org/newswire/TCTa9ooqT3DboRd6J1fy5_
Published: 2026-09-18T16:18:31.590Z
Story chronology: 2026-09-18T13:25:00.000Z
Retrieved: 2026-09-18T18:24:25.705Z
Publisher: Tech & Business (techandbusiness.org)