Amazon EC2 M9g and M9gd Instances Powered by AWS Graviton5 Are Now Generally Available
Amazon Web Services has officially announced the general availability of its latest generation of EC2 instances: the Amazon EC2 M9g and the brand-new M9gd instances, both powered by the newly launched AWS Graviton5 processor. First previewed at re:Invent 2025, these instances represent a significant leap forward in cloud compute performance, energy efficiency, and price-performance optimization — and real-world customer data is already backing up those claims in a compelling way.
Whether you are running high-throughput web applications, relational databases, observability pipelines, or analytics platforms, the M9g and M9gd instances are engineered to deliver measurable gains with minimal friction. Here is everything you need to know about what makes these instances special and why AWS customers are already migrating workloads at scale.
What Is AWS Graviton5?
AWS Graviton5 is the fifth generation of custom Arm-based processors designed and built in-house by Amazon Web Services. With each successive generation, AWS has pushed the boundaries of what custom silicon can deliver in a cloud environment. Graviton5 continues this tradition by being the most powerful and most energy-efficient processor AWS has ever produced.
While many cloud providers have introduced Arm-based instances in recent years, AWS stands apart through the sheer breadth and depth of its Graviton ecosystem. After five generations of custom silicon and eight years of continuous investment in Arm architecture, the Graviton platform has matured into one of the most battle-tested and performance-optimized compute environments available in public cloud today. No other provider comes close to the scale at which AWS has refined this technology.
EC2 M9g Instances: General Purpose Performance Redefined
The EC2 M9g instances are the flagship general-purpose offering in this new generation. They are designed to handle a broad range of workloads — from web servers and application backends to in-memory caches and mid-size databases — where a balanced ratio of compute, memory, and networking is critical.
During the extended preview period since re:Invent 2025, AWS customers were invited to test M9g instances across diverse production and staging environments. The results published by early adopters are striking and speak volumes about the real-world impact of Graviton5.
Real Customer Results from the Preview Period
- ClickHouse reported a 36% performance boost compared to the previous-generation M8g instances — with absolutely zero code changes required. This is a strong signal for teams looking to improve performance without engineering overhead.
- Honeycomb, the observability platform, conducted a rigorous six-month A/B test of production workloads and achieved 36% better throughput per core compared to Graviton4. This kind of sustained improvement across a half-year test in a live production environment carries significant weight.
- HubSpot deployed M9g instances specifically for MySQL database workloads and saw query duration drop by up to 60%. For data-intensive SaaS platforms, that level of database acceleration can directly translate to a better end-user experience and reduced infrastructure costs.
These are not synthetic benchmarks or controlled lab conditions. These are production workloads from real companies at scale — and the consistency of the results across very different use cases underscores how broadly the performance gains apply.
EC2 M9gd Instances: Local NVMe Storage Meets Graviton5 Power
Alongside the M9g, AWS is also launching the EC2 M9gd instances — a variant specifically designed for customers who require high-speed, low-latency local storage in addition to powerful compute. The "d" suffix denotes the inclusion of locally attached NVMe SSD storage, which provides significantly faster storage I/O compared to network-attached options.
M9gd instances are an ideal fit for workloads such as:
- Large-scale NoSQL databases that benefit from fast local reads and writes
- Data lake processing and ETL pipelines with high intermediate storage demands
- Real-time analytics engines where storage latency is a bottleneck
- Caching layers and session stores that need rapid data persistence
- High-frequency transactional databases running on-instance storage for maximum throughput
By pairing the computational advantages of Graviton5 with local NVMe storage, the M9gd instances unlock a performance profile that was previously difficult to achieve without moving to more specialized or expensive instance families.
Why the Graviton5 Generation Matters for Cost and Sustainability
Performance improvements are only part of the story. AWS has consistently emphasized that each new Graviton generation delivers better price-performance, meaning you get more compute for every dollar spent. With M9g and M9gd, teams running large fleets of instances can expect to either reduce their cloud spend for the same throughput, or dramatically increase their capacity without proportionally increasing their bill.
Energy efficiency is the other major dimension. Graviton5 is the most energy-efficient processor AWS has ever built, which means lower power consumption per unit of work completed. For organizations with sustainability goals and carbon reduction commitments, migrating to Graviton5-powered instances is a concrete, measurable step toward a greener infrastructure footprint — without sacrificing performance.
How to Get Started with EC2 M9g and M9gd Today
Both M9g and M9gd instances are now generally available, meaning they are ready for production use and are no longer in preview. Teams that were testing these instances during the preview period can now confidently move forward with full migrations. For teams just getting started, the path to evaluation is straightforward:
- Review your existing instance types and identify general-purpose workloads currently running on M7g, M8g, or x86-based equivalents
- Use AWS Compute Optimizer to get automated recommendations on migration candidates
- Run your own A/B tests or staged rollouts using M9g alongside existing instances to measure real performance deltas in your environment
- Consult the AWS Graviton migration guide to understand any software compatibility considerations for Arm-based workloads
For most modern software stacks running on Linux, the migration to Graviton5 is seamless. Major language runtimes, databases, and frameworks have strong Arm support, and as the ClickHouse example shows, significant performance improvements can come with no application-level changes whatsoever.
The Bottom Line
The general availability of Amazon EC2 M9g and M9gd instances marks another significant milestone in AWS's long-running commitment to custom silicon. With Graviton5, AWS has once again raised the bar on what cloud compute can deliver — combining raw performance, energy efficiency, and competitive pricing in a way that benefits workloads of every shape and size. If you are running compute-intensive or storage-sensitive workloads on AWS, M9g and M9gd deserve a serious evaluation today.