The Agentic Era Part 5: Building the Agentic Cloud

Why the current cloud infrastructure is ill-suited for agentic systems and requires a new "agentic-native" approach.

Credit: Steve Johnson

The artificial intelligence landscape stands at an inflection point that should profoundly reshape how we think about computational infrastructure. The emergence of agentic AI systems—autonomous agents capable of complex reasoning, coordination, and persistent memory—demands architectural approaches that differ from today's cloud computing paradigms.

This transformation raises critical questions about the $320 billion in projected infrastructure investment by hyperscale providers during 2025 and whether this massive spending targets the right architectural foundations.

Over the first four parts of this Agentic Era series, I’ve established that orchestration creates new competitive moats, that architectural choices between model-centric and workflow-centric approaches determine value capture, that protocols like MCP and A2A form the invisible operating system for coordination, and that outcome-based frameworks must replace traditional SaaS metrics.

For this latest c…