AWS Graviton processors have improved steadily across generations, with each iteration delivering advances in compute performance, price-performance, and energy efficiency. At re:Invent 2025, we announced Amazon EC2 M9g, the first Graviton5-powered instances, in preview. Since then, customers have tested M9g across a wide range of workloads and shared their results.
ClickHouse saw a 36% performance boost compared to M8g, with zero code changes. Honeycomb achieved 36% better throughput per core compared to Graviton4, across a 6-month A/B test of production observability workloads. HubSpot deployed M9g for MySQL databases and saw query duration drop by up to 60%.
Today, M9g instances are generally available, alongside the new M9gd instances for customers who need high-speed, low-latency local NVMe SSD storage. Both are powered by Graviton5 , the most powerful and most energy efficient processor AWS has ever built. While many Arm-based instances have been introduced across the industry, no one comes close to the breadth and depth of the AWS Graviton footprint.
After five generations of custom silicon and eight years of continuous investment, Graviton powers over 350 instance types serving more than 120,000 customers, from startups to large enterprises, a robust ISV partner ecosystem, and a broad set of managed services. You can use Graviton for a broad variety of workloads, including web applications, microservices, analytics, databases, machine learning (ML) inference, electronic design automation (EDA), gaming, and video encoding.
As workloads grow more compute-intensive and data-driven, many have asked for more processing power, along with greater network and storage bandwidth to move more data and complete workloads faster. We’ve also designed these instances to efficiently package compute, memory, and I/O to maximize energy utilization. As AI shifts from answering questions to taking actions, running code, using tools, evaluating results, and orchestrating multi-step tasks, the demand for CPU compute is growing rapidly.
Graviton5 is built for this shift. With 192 cores, a 5x larger L3 cache, up to 33% lower inter-core latency, and DDR5 memory delivering high bandwidth, Graviton5 helps agents spend less time waiting on CPU-bound steps, processing more instructions, handling large numbers of concurrent environments, and keeping accelerators moving. Meta is deploying Graviton at scale starting with tens of millions of cores to support its agentic AI efforts, making Meta one of the largest Graviton customers in the world.
Agentic AI workloads, including real-time reasoning, code generation, and the orchestration of multi-step tasks, are CPU-intensive and benefit from the higher compute performance, larger caches, higher memory bandwidth, and core density in Graviton5. What’s new in M9g and M9gd Built on the sixth-generation AWS Nitro System , M9g instances are powered by AWS Graviton5 processors that deliver higher compute performance, larger caches, and improved memory and I/O scalability compared to Graviton4 processors.
Graviton5 offers up to 25% better compute performance compared to Graviton4-based instances, with up to 35% faster performance for web applications, up to 35% for machine learning inference, and up to 30% for databases. As the first CPU in the AWS fleet to support the latest generation of PCIe Gen6 and DDR5-8800 memory, AWS Graviton5 instances deliver the fastest memory of any processor instances in the cloud, and 5 times more L3 cache compared to the previous generation.
These improvements also come with better energy efficiency, helping you meet sustainability targets without compromising capability. Networking and storage bandwidth have been expanded to keep pace with compute growth. M9g and M9gd instances offer up to 15% higher network bandwidth and 20% higher Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) bandwidth on average across sizes, with up to twice the network bandwidth for the largest instance size.
M9g and M9gd instances also support Instance Bandwidth Configuration (IBC) , a feature that helps you adjust the allocation of bandwidth between Amazon EBS and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) networking for an Amazon EC2 instance by up to 25%. IBC can help optimize performance for workloads with specific bandwidth requirements, such as database read and write performance, query processing, and logging.
These enhancements support faster data movement and improved throughput for workloads that rely on high I/O performance. Security and isolation are foundational requirements for running workloads in the cloud. Within the Nitro System, the AWS Nitro Hypervisor is designed to isolate instances from each other as well as AWS operators.
With M9g and M9gd instances we are raising the bar on security even further with the introduction of Nitro Isolation Engine. Nitro Isolation Engine is an enhancement to the Nitro System, which enforces isolation of instances and harnesses formal verification to provide assurances of isolation with mathematical precision. Nitro Isolation Engine is a purpose-built component that is responsible for enforcing isolation between virtual machines, including mediation of all access to virtual machine memory, CPU register state, and I/O devices through a minimal set of APIs.
Nitro Isolation Engine leverages formal verification, a technique to mathematically demonstrate that the hardware or software behaves as intended, and not just in specific test cases. This intensive verification technique establishes Nitro as the first formally verified cloud hypervisor, pioneering a new standard for mathematically proven cloud security.
Originally published at aws.amazon.com
