192 Cores and 5x L3 Cache! Graviton5-Powered EC2 M9g and M9gd Are Here!

Hi everyone, it's Shiichan! Today a big piece of news landed that CPU fans are going to love! AWS has officially launched servers powered by a brand-new generation of processor. Let's dig into it together!

AWS Blog aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

Today's news comes from the AWS News Blog. Amazon EC2's new M9g and M9gd instances are now generally available! Both are powered by AWS Graviton5, a chip AWS designed in-house. M9g is general-purpose, while M9gd adds fast, low-latency local NVMe SSD storage on top.

M9g was originally announced in preview at re:Invent 2025, and this GA launch comes after many customers put it through its paces.

The story so far

AWS Graviton processors have steadily improved with each generation, delivering advances in compute performance, price-performance, and energy efficiency. After five generations and eight years of investment, Graviton now powers over 350 instance types and serves more than 120,000 customers. That's an incredible scale!

But workloads keep getting heavier and more data-hungry, and people have been asking for more compute power along with more network and storage bandwidth. Lately, AI has been shifting from just answering questions to running code, using tools, evaluating results, and orchestrating multi-step tasks, which is driving demand for CPU compute up fast.

What changes

That's where Graviton5 comes in! Compared to Graviton4, it delivers up to 25% better compute performance. By use case, that's up to 35% faster for web applications, up to 35% for machine learning inference, and up to 30% for databases. It also brings better energy efficiency, which is great for sustainability goals.

The customer results are impressive too:

• ClickHouse saw a 36% performance boost compared to M8g, with zero code changes
• Honeycomb achieved 36% better throughput per core versus Graviton4, across a 6-month production A/B test
• HubSpot ran MySQL databases and saw query duration drop by up to 60%

Meta is also deploying Graviton at scale, starting with tens of millions of cores for its agentic AI efforts, making it one of the largest Graviton customers in the world.

Dive Deep

Let's peek inside Graviton5. Each processor has 192 cores, an L3 cache 5x larger than the previous generation, and up to 33% lower inter-core latency. It's the first CPU in the AWS fleet to support PCIe Gen6 and DDR5-8800 memory, giving it the fastest memory of any processor instances in the cloud.

The instances are built on the sixth-generation AWS Nitro System. Network bandwidth is up to 15% higher on average, and Amazon EBS bandwidth is up to 20% higher on average, with up to twice the network bandwidth on the largest size.

One neat feature is Instance Bandwidth Configuration (IBC), which lets you dynamically adjust the bandwidth allocation between Amazon EBS and Amazon VPC networking by up to 25%. It helps with workloads that have specific bandwidth needs, like database reads and writes, query processing, and logging.

Sizes range from medium up to 48xlarge, plus the bare-metal metal-48xl. M9g provides 1 vCPU for every 4 GiB of memory, so the smallest medium is 1 vCPU and 4 GiB, while the largest 48xlarge is 192 vCPU and 768 GiB. Network bandwidth ranges up to 15 Gbps to 100 Gbps, and EBS bandwidth up to 12 Gbps to 72 Gbps. M9gd adds local NVMe SSD storage up to 11.4 TB, with 30% higher IOPS and storage performance compared to M8gd.

On the security side, the new Nitro Isolation Engine is a highlight worth noting. It's a purpose-built component that enforces isolation between virtual machines, mediating access to memory, CPU register state, and I/O devices through a minimal set of APIs. It uses formal verification, a technique that mathematically demonstrates the behavior is correct, which makes Nitro the first formally verified cloud hypervisor. That is honestly pretty cool!

The instances are available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt). You can purchase them through Savings Plans, On-Demand, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances, or Dedicated Hosts.

Wrap-up

• The new Amazon EC2 M9g and M9gd instances are GA, powered by the new AWS Graviton5 chip
• Versus Graviton4: up to 25% better compute, up to 35% for web apps and ML inference, and up to 30% for databases
• 192 cores, 5x L3 cache, and DDR5-8800 support make them strong for CPU-intensive workloads like agentic AI
• M9gd comes with up to 11.4 TB of local NVMe SSD, and IBC lets you tune bandwidth allocation
• The new Nitro Isolation Engine delivers formally verified isolation

If you want to squeeze out more cost-efficiency and energy savings from Arm-based instances, or you're running CPU-heavy agentic AI or large-scale Java, this is a launch you'll want to check out first!