AWS Graviton5 Is Here: Amazon EC2 M9g and M9gd Instances Now Generally Available
AWS has officially announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 M9g and M9gd instances, both powered by the new AWS Graviton5 processor. First previewed at re:Invent 2025, these instances represent the latest leap in a long line of custom AWS silicon innovations — and early customer results suggest they may be the most impactful generation yet. Whether you're running databases, observability platforms, or general-purpose workloads, M9g and M9gd instances offer a compelling combination of raw performance, energy efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.
What Is the AWS Graviton5 Processor?
The AWS Graviton5 is described by AWS as the most powerful and most energy-efficient processor the company has ever built. It is the fifth generation of AWS's custom Arm-based silicon, developed specifically to optimize cloud workloads at scale. After eight years of continuous development and five generations of custom chip design, Graviton5 marks a significant milestone in AWS's silicon roadmap.
Each generation of Graviton has delivered measurable improvements in compute performance, price-performance ratio, and energy efficiency. Graviton5 continues and accelerates this trajectory, offering meaningful gains across all three dimensions compared to its predecessor, Graviton4. For businesses looking to reduce cloud spend while improving throughput, Graviton5-based instances present a highly attractive option — especially now that they're in full production availability.
M9g vs. M9gd: Understanding the Difference
Both instance families are powered by Graviton5 and are designed for general-purpose workloads, but they cater to slightly different infrastructure requirements.
- Amazon EC2 M9g instances are the standard general-purpose offering powered by Graviton5. They are ideal for a broad range of workloads including web servers, application servers, small and mid-sized databases, microservices, and enterprise applications.
- Amazon EC2 M9gd instances are designed for customers who require high-speed, low-latency local NVMe SSD storage in addition to Graviton5's compute power. These instances are particularly suitable for workloads that benefit from fast local storage access, such as caching layers, data processing pipelines, and applications with high I/O requirements.
By offering both variants simultaneously, AWS ensures that teams can choose the right instance type based on their specific storage and performance architecture without having to compromise on compute power.
Real Customer Results: What Early Adopters Saw
During the preview period following the re:Invent 2025 announcement, a number of AWS customers tested M9g instances against real production workloads. The results were striking and came from a diverse range of use cases.
ClickHouse: 36% Performance Boost with Zero Code Changes
ClickHouse, the popular open-source columnar database management system used for real-time analytics, benchmarked M9g instances against the previous generation M8g instances. The outcome was a 36% performance improvement — and crucially, this gain required no code changes whatsoever. For engineering teams evaluating a migration from M8g to M9g, this represents a near-frictionless path to better performance at a competitive price point.
Honeycomb: 36% Better Throughput Per Core Over Six Months
Honeycomb, an observability and monitoring platform, took a rigorous approach to evaluating Graviton5 by conducting a six-month A/B test across production observability workloads. Comparing Graviton4 to Graviton5-powered instances, Honeycomb achieved 36% better throughput per core. This kind of extended, real-world production testing adds significant credibility to the performance claims and demonstrates that Graviton5 delivers sustained efficiency improvements — not just burst gains in synthetic benchmarks.
HubSpot: MySQL Query Duration Cut by Up to 60%
HubSpot, one of the world's leading CRM and marketing platforms, deployed M9g instances for MySQL database workloads. The results were remarkable: query duration dropped by up to 60%. For a company operating databases at the scale HubSpot does, this kind of improvement directly translates to faster user experiences, reduced latency across the product, and the potential for meaningful cost savings through right-sizing or consolidation.
Why Graviton5 Matters for Your Cloud Strategy
The availability of M9g and M9gd instances is not just a hardware announcement — it's a strategic opportunity for engineering and infrastructure teams to reassess their current instance configurations. Here are several reasons why Graviton5 deserves a place in your cloud roadmap:
- Price-performance leadership: AWS Graviton instances have consistently offered better price-performance than comparable x86-based instances, and Graviton5 continues that trend with meaningful generational improvements.
- Energy efficiency at scale: Graviton5 is the most energy-efficient processor AWS has built, which matters both for sustainability goals and for workloads where energy costs represent a meaningful share of total infrastructure spend.
- Broad ecosystem support: AWS has the deepest Arm-based cloud footprint in the industry. Graviton is supported across a wide range of AWS services, and the software ecosystem — including major Linux distributions, container runtimes, databases, and language runtimes — is mature and well-tested on Graviton.
- No code changes required for many workloads: As ClickHouse demonstrated, many applications running on Graviton4 or even x86 instances can be migrated to M9g with minimal or no modification, lowering the barrier to adoption significantly.
- Local NVMe storage option: The addition of M9gd instances broadens the use cases covered under Graviton5, making it a viable choice for storage-intensive workloads that previously required alternative instance families.
Getting Started with Amazon EC2 M9g and M9gd
With general availability now confirmed, teams can begin deploying M9g and M9gd instances in production environments without the limitations of a preview program. AWS recommends starting with a workload assessment to identify which of your current instances are running on Graviton4 or older generations, as those are the most natural migration candidates. From there, spinning up an M9g instance and running your existing workload is often sufficient to measure the performance delta before committing to a full migration.
For workloads that are latency-sensitive or rely on fast ephemeral storage, M9gd instances should be evaluated specifically for the throughput and IOPS characteristics of their local NVMe storage configuration. AWS provides detailed instance specifications and storage performance benchmarks in their documentation to help teams make informed decisions.
The Bigger Picture: AWS's Custom Silicon Leadership
The launch of Graviton5 and the M9g instance family underscores a broader trend that has become impossible to ignore: custom silicon is now one of the primary competitive differentiators in cloud computing. AWS has invested heavily in this area over eight years, and the compounding returns of that investment are visible in the generational leaps each new Graviton delivers. While other cloud providers and chip manufacturers have introduced Arm-based offerings, AWS's combination of silicon depth, software ecosystem maturity, and service breadth remains unmatched in the industry.
Amazon EC2 M9g and M9gd instances are now available today. For workloads where performance, efficiency, and cost all matter — and that covers most production workloads — Graviton5 is worth evaluating as your next infrastructure upgrade.