AWS Graviton5-Powered EC2 M9g and M9gd Instances Are Now Generally Available
Amazon Web Services has officially announced the general availability of its latest generation of compute instances: the Amazon EC2 M9g and M9gd instances, both powered by the brand-new AWS Graviton5 processor. First previewed at re:Invent 2025, these instances represent a major leap forward in cloud compute performance, price-performance ratio, and energy efficiency. For developers, architects, and enterprises running demanding workloads on AWS, this launch is a significant milestone worth paying close attention to.
What Is AWS Graviton5?
AWS Graviton5 is the fifth generation of AWS's custom Arm-based silicon, and it is the most powerful and most energy-efficient processor the company has ever built. Each generation of Graviton has brought meaningful improvements over its predecessor, but Graviton5 represents a particularly notable jump. Built on advanced process technology and tuned specifically for cloud-native workloads, Graviton5 delivers exceptional throughput, lower latency, and reduced power consumption compared to Graviton4.
While the broader industry has seen a surge in Arm-based instance offerings, AWS maintains a unique position due to the breadth and depth of its Graviton footprint. After five generations of custom silicon and eight years of continuous investment and refinement, the Graviton platform offers a level of ecosystem maturity and real-world validation that competitors have yet to match.
EC2 M9g: General-Purpose Performance at Scale
The EC2 M9g instances are designed for a broad range of general-purpose workloads where a balanced mix of compute, memory, and networking resources is essential. Whether you are running web servers, application backends, containerized microservices, machine learning inference, or analytics platforms, M9g instances offer the performance headroom to handle these tasks more efficiently than their predecessors.
Since the preview launch, customers across industries have put M9g instances through rigorous real-world testing, and the results speak for themselves. Here are some standout findings from early adopters:
- ClickHouse reported a 36% performance boost compared to M8g instances, and crucially, this improvement required zero code changes. Teams were able to simply migrate and immediately benefit from the enhanced throughput that Graviton5 provides.
- Honeycomb, a leading observability platform, achieved 36% better throughput per core compared to Graviton4. This result was validated through an extensive six-month A/B test running production observability workloads, giving it a high degree of reliability and real-world credibility.
- HubSpot deployed M9g instances for their MySQL database workloads and saw query duration drop by up to 60%. For a company managing enormous volumes of CRM and marketing data, that kind of latency reduction translates directly into a better product experience for millions of end users.
These numbers are not just impressive in isolation — they demonstrate consistent, meaningful gains across a diverse set of use cases, which is exactly what enterprise customers need before committing to a migration at scale.
EC2 M9gd: High-Speed Local NVMe Storage for Latency-Sensitive Workloads
Alongside M9g, AWS is also launching the M9gd instances. The key differentiator here is the addition of high-speed, low-latency local NVMe SSD storage, making M9gd the right choice for workloads that require fast access to locally attached storage rather than relying solely on network-attached volumes like Amazon EBS.
M9gd instances are well-suited for use cases such as NoSQL databases, in-memory caches with persistent storage, real-time data processing pipelines, and any workload where disk I/O latency is a critical bottleneck. By combining the raw compute power of Graviton5 with fast local NVMe storage, M9gd delivers a tightly integrated performance profile that can dramatically reduce bottlenecks in I/O-intensive applications.
Why Graviton5 Matters for Price-Performance and Sustainability
One of the most compelling reasons to adopt Graviton-based instances has always been price-performance. Graviton5 continues this tradition, offering better performance at lower cost compared to equivalent x86-based instance types. For organizations with large-scale AWS deployments, migrating to M9g or M9gd instances can translate to substantial cost savings without sacrificing — and often while improving — application performance.
Beyond cost, energy efficiency is becoming an increasingly important factor in cloud infrastructure decisions. AWS Graviton5 is designed to deliver more compute per watt than any previous Graviton generation. For sustainability-focused organizations looking to reduce their carbon footprint while scaling infrastructure, Graviton5-based instances offer a compelling path forward. Doing more with less power is no longer just a financial benefit — it is an environmental one as well.
Who Should Consider Migrating to M9g or M9gd?
If you are currently running workloads on M8g, M7g, or even older x86-based M-series instances, now is a strong time to evaluate a migration to M9g or M9gd. The transition is typically straightforward, as Graviton instances support common Linux distributions, popular runtimes like Java, Python, Node.js, and Go, and major container orchestration platforms including Amazon EKS and ECS.
Organizations that will benefit most from this upgrade include those running high-throughput databases, real-time analytics engines, observability stacks, content delivery services, and containerized application platforms. Given that ClickHouse achieved its performance gains without any code changes, many teams may find the migration to be lower effort than anticipated.
Getting Started with Amazon EC2 M9g and M9gd
Both M9g and M9gd instances are now generally available in select AWS regions. You can launch them through the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, or infrastructure-as-code tools like AWS CloudFormation and Terraform. AWS also provides detailed migration guides and the AWS Graviton Getting Started resource to help teams assess compatibility and plan their transition.
As Graviton5 continues to roll out across additional instance families and regions, it is clear that AWS is doubling down on its custom silicon strategy. For cloud teams focused on performance, efficiency, and cost optimization, Amazon EC2 M9g and M9gd instances are a compelling upgrade that deserves serious evaluation today.