Graviton5 Is Here! EC2 C9g and C9gd Make Your Compute Fly!

Hey everyone, it's me, Shii-chan! Today AWS dropped some news about a shiny new CPU that a lot of us were waiting for. I love a good chip generation jump!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

On the AWS What's New feed, Amazon EC2's new compute-optimized instances C9g and C9gd went generally available (GA), starting June 30, 2026.

The headline is that both are powered by AWS's own fifth-generation CPU, Graviton5. The announcement calls Graviton5 "the fifth generation of custom-designed CPUs, delivering the best price performance for compute-intensive workloads." The C9gd flavor adds high-speed, low-latency local NVMe SSD storage.

The story so far

Until now, the go-to for heavier compute has been the Graviton4-based C8g / C8gd. Graviton has gotten faster and cheaper with each generation, and C9g / C9gd is the natural successor. So if you were on C8g, you can move over and just get faster — a very nice upgrade path.

What changes

The numbers are concrete, so let me line them up. Compared to the previous C8g / C8gd:

• Up to 25% better compute performance
• Up to 30% faster for databases
• Up to 35% faster for web applications
• Up to 35% faster for machine learning

On top of that, the cache is 5x larger, and the announcement says it has "the fastest memory of any processor instances in the cloud." The more your work is compute-bound, the more that gap helps.

Dive Deep

The target workloads are broad: HPC, batch processing, gaming, video encoding, scientific modeling, distributed analytics, CPU-based ML inference, real-time analytics, and ad serving. C9gd is positioned for workloads that need high-speed, low-latency local NVMe SSD storage.

Available regions to start: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Frankfurt). Purchase options include Savings Plans, On-Demand, Spot, Dedicated Instances, and Dedicated Hosts.

The announcement did not list vCPU counts, memory sizes, or network bandwidth, so for the details check the C9g / C9gd instances page. If you are considering a move to Graviton, the Level up your compute with AWS Graviton page is a helpful read too.

Wrap-up

• AWS made EC2 C9g / C9gd GA, powered by the fifth-gen Graviton5 CPU
• Versus C8g / C8gd: up to 25% compute, 30% DB, and 35% web / ML speedups
• 5x larger cache and fast memory are the highlights
• Live in US East / West and EU (Frankfurt), with C9gd adding local NVMe SSD

This one lands best for anyone running compute-heavy Graviton workloads and infra folks squeezing for better price performance!