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. And as AI agents move from demos to production, that distinction is becoming the most consequential infrastructure decision a developer can make.…