Cloud Engines UNVEILED on ICP — Dom's Full Post (Animated)

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Dear ICP community, the internet computer has now been running strong for 5 years. Here is a celebratory preview of ICP Cloud Engines, the sovereign Frontier Cloud technology the network shall soon provide from opencloud.org.

[00:00:15]Main points cloud engines enable anyone to spin up their own sovereign frontier cloud. The technology involves an extraordinary inventive step in which cloud is created from a mathematically secure network of nodes. The nodes run as part of the internet computer network at internetcomputer.org but are selected and configured by the cloud engines owner. The frontier cloud provided by engines is strongly focused on enabling AI agents to build and update online applications and services for us. The world is changing fast and nearly all new online apps and services are already being built with the help of AI and thus cloud engines target the future of cloud. Software hosted on cloud engines is tamperproof, which means that it is immune to infrastructure hacks because it runs inside a mathematically secure network protocol rather than on computers directly. This means that AI agents and those building with them don't need to have a security team in the loop or to trust someone else's security team. This is crucial because in the future, non-technical people will demand the freedom to build with full automation where they just need to issue instructions to AI about what to build and don't need to worry about anything or anyone else. Of course, apps and services running on engines are also vastly safer from the new breed of hacker being enabled by Frontier AI. The cloud engines themselves are also tamperproof. Even if a hacker gains physical access to some portion of a cloud engine's nodes and can make arbitrary changes, the computations and data of the hosted apps and services cannot be corrupted or interrupted so long as the network's fault bounds aren't exceeded. The recent hack of Verscell, a major cloud platform which gave hackers access to the apps it hosted, provides additional perspective on the importance of this advantage.

[00:02:00]Software hosted on cloud engines is guaranteed to run so long as a sufficient number of the engine's nodes are running. This means that AI can build applications and services without the need to have a human systems admin team constantly tinkering with the underlying platform to keep it running which is again crucial because in the future non-technical people will expect the freedom to use AI to build without the support of others. New frontier programming language technology in the form of the MCO language developed by Caffeine Labs leverages seminal orthogonal persistence technology that unifies program logic and data to deliver further unlocks for AI. MCO is the first computer language being developed that targets agents that are writing software rather than human engineers per se. Nowadays, AI can build and update production apps at a prodigious rate, even at the speed of conversation. But it can also make mistakes and there's a risk that an update it creates might be lossy in the sense that it causes some transformed data to be lost. Again, in this new world, it's both undesirable and impractical for everyone to have to have a systems admin team on hand to detect lossy updates and roll them back. But MCO provides a solution. It can detect new software updates or lossy before they are applied, reducing potentially catastrophic errors by AI to harmless coding retries. Software hosted on cloud engines is serverless. But unlike traditional serverless software, it directly incorporates data through orthogonal persistence. Another key purpose is to simplify back-end software logic and fuel the modeling power of AI by increasing abstraction. Put simply, this enables AI to produce more sophisticated backends faster and at dramatically lower costs as measured by the number of AI API tokens consumed during coding. Tip for the technical orthogonal persistence is a new paradigm where the program is the database and data lives inside program variables which is possible because it's as if hosted software runs forever in persistent memory. An expanding database of skills at skills.incomput.org shall make it possible to develop and directly deploy apps and services to your cloud engines directly from claude code perplexity codeex and other AI platforms. Further, your account on caffeine.ai can be connected so that new apps and updates created through conversation automatically appear hosted from your cloud engine. In the future, R&D is going to be very seamless. You converse with AI and your secure and unstoppable apps or services are created or updated. Cloud engines are designed to directly support this self-writing cloud future where we can work hands-free. Tech sovereignty is becoming a huge issue worldwide with governments and corporations seeking to create sovereign tech stacks owing to geopolitical tensions. Increasingly, people are realizing that tech provided by foreign nations can come with hidden back doors and kill switches from the base platform right through hosted apps and services. ICP technology is open source and those building on ICP using AI own their own source code. When you have the source code, you can verify that there are no back doors. And when you own the source code, thanks to AI, you can update it at will, freeing you from vendor lock in. But cloud engines take sovereignty much further. You create a cloud engine by selecting the nodes that will be combined. You can choose the class of nodes used and their number. But more importantly, you can choose who operates the nodes and where they are located. Almost any configuration is possible because the internet computer scales the security privileges afforded to hosted software within the network according to configuration. Software hosted on cloud engines can directly interoperate with software on other engines and traditional subnets, but base restrictions are applied according to security rules. A cloud engine can be created within a region such as Europe to comply with regulations such as GDPR or completely within a sovereign state like Switzerland or Pakistan. But cloud engines go further still. Sovereignty is also about freedom from vendor lockin.

[00:06:02]Cloud engines are essentially internet computer protocol network configurations. And this means the underlying compute nodes they combine can be swapped out without interrupting their hosted apps and services. This is a big deal. In addition, cloud engines now support nodes that are instances running on big tech clouds in addition to nodes that are dedicated specialized hardware as per the Gen 1 and Gen 2 nodes that dominate the internet computer. Today, for example, it is possible to have an engine running across different AWS data centers and then reconfigure the engine to run across a mixture of AWS, Google, Azure, and Hennner for even more resilience without the users of hosted apps and services noticing a thing. Sovereign AI is becoming increasingly important too.

[00:06:47]And cloud engines allow special AI nodes to be added to them so that hosted software can perform inference on hardware provisioned by the owner from a location the owner has selected. Even though the AI nodes are only accessible within the cloud engine, they can still benefit from the forthcoming internet intelligence gateway which will make it possible to validate inference performed on key frontier open weights LLMs even in the inference is performed on completely independent AI clouds. When the results of inference are received, this technology can verify that neither the prompt and context nor the inference result have been modified and that the results were produced by the precise LLM expected. This ensures that AI clouds don't cheat by running inference on cheaper models than are being paid for and that bad actors aren't modifying the inputs or outputs to surreptitiously insert advertising into results or change facts or insert malware when code is being generated. What's super cool about this technology is that the cost of the verification is scalable. Very valuable additional security can be achieved with only 1 to 2% of extra cost. Scaling apps and services when they hit capacity limits is another thorny problem that cloud engines help the world address. Engines make scaling possible without rewriting or reconfiguring software. The query workload capacity of hosted software can be horizontally scaled simply by adding new nodes to an engine. And nodes can also be added in geographical proximity to demand. Meanwhile, update workload capacity can first be scaled up by swapping an engine's nodes out for the next class up and then when no larger class of node is available, horizontally scaled out by splitting the engine into two, which doubles available capacity.

[00:08:33]Technical tip, horizontally scaling update capacity by splitting engines requires multicister architectures. For those who have been following how Caffeine builds apps that can efficiently store large numbers of files, I should mention that apps built on cloud engines will also support the new ICP blob storage cloud network since cloud engines currently have up to about 3 TB of memory, which apps storing large amounts of files can easily exceed. We are also working on allowing blob storage nodes to be added to cloud engines to enable sovereign mass blob storage within an engine, similarly to how AI nodes can be added currently.

[00:09:10]Lastly, but certainly not least, I should mention that cloud engines are multiblockchain capable and ready for digital assets thanks to the clever math at their core. For example, an e-commerce service built on a cloud engine can securely accept and custody stable coin payments or a multi-chain decentralized exchange could be hosted.

[00:09:29]Further, engines can support software autonomy, software orchestrated and controlled by other autonomous software in a decentralized way and can themselves be orchestrated by SNS technology and thus run autonomously too. Today though, the focus is on mainstream cloud. This year, the cloud industry will generate approximately $1 trillion in revenue. That number is already huge, but it is expected to grow to $2 trillion by 2030. After years of continuous development, which have seen more than $500 million spent on R&D, the internet computer network is now tacking directly toward this mainstream cloud market with cloud engine technology. In their first version, cloud engines are not meant to be a cloud panacea. For example, currently they are not ideal for working with big data. You should use something like data bricks for that.

[00:10:20]Cloud engines are carefully targeted at enabling AI to produce traditional online applications and services, including SAS, in a safer and more productive way, which represents a new market segment with tremendous potential. Of course, Definity will continue to work relentlessly to push forward ICP's capabilities. So, expect further developments. It's worth mentioning that this cloud segment isn't just about creating new apps and services using AI. It's also about replacing legacy systems and apps built on super expensive SAS services.

[00:10:53]Caffeine Labs is working to produce technology Caffeine Snorkel that can study an enterprises legacy systems and apps built on SAS, create replacement systems and apps and migrate the data while supporting key stakeholders through the process over email and chat with full automation. Thus, the legacy systems and SAS markets shall also be addressed by cloud engines. Zooming out and reasoning in a more metaphysical way, we believe, as we always have, that there is room for a new kind of cloud created by mathematical networks that provides seinal advances in the fields of security and resilience as well as true sovereignty and freedom from lockin. that this same technology with the help of additional technologies like orthogonal persistence in Motookco enables AI to build for us without the need for so much oversight and to create more back-end sophistication while consuming fewer AI API tokens enables ICP to bring game-changing advances to the world. Cloud engines will work synergistically with the intelligence gateway which will enable apps and services running on engines to seamlessly leverage AI wherever that AI is running while providing verifiability at extremely low cost for open weights frontier models. We believe that cloud engines represent an inflection point in the storied history of the internet computer project and I'm very proud to be sharing the details with you on the network's fth birthday. I'll be back with more news soon.