The industry is splitting in two. Here’s everything you need to know before you pick a side.

Reading time: 13–15 minutes | Published: May 2026

There’s a split happening in AI agent infrastructure that nobody is talking about loudly enough.

On one side: cloud-native embedding and memory services — fast to set up, easy to scale, billed by the query, storing your agent’s memories on someone else’s servers. On the other: local sovereign memory — your data, your machine, your graph, your rules.

Most comparison articles treat this as a technical footnote. It isn’t. Where your agent’s memories live determines who owns your agent’s intelligence.…