A few months ago, we announced Fluid compute , an approach to serverless computing that uses resources more efficiently, minimizes cold starts, and significantly reduces costs. More recently at Vercel Ship 2025 , we introduced Active CPU pricing for even more cost-effective compute on Vercel.

Fluid compute with Active CPU pricing powers over 45 billion weekly requests, saving customers up to 95% and never charging CPU rates for idle time.

Behind the scenes, it took over two years to build the required infrastructure to make this possible.

Link to heading It all started with a simple idea

In 2020, the React team started working on React Server Components (RSC) . RSCs allow requests rendered server-side to stream back parts of the UI as they become available.…