Amazon Web Services has made the M9g and M9gd instances, based on the Graviton5 processor, generally available. The new generation delivers up to 25 percent more compute performance than Graviton4, with specific improvements for databases, web applications, and machine learning.
AWS first announced the M9g instances as a preview during re:Invent 2025. Since then, companies have extensively tested the instances on production workloads. ClickHouse reported a 36 percent performance improvement over M8g without any code changes. HubSpot saw query times for MySQL databases drop by up to 60 percent after deploying M9g. Honeycomb achieved 36 percent higher throughput per core than Graviton4, as measured over a six-month A/B test on production observability workloads.
The M9g instances run on the sixth generation of the AWS Nitro System and feature 192 cores, a five-times larger L3 cache, and DDR5-8800 memory. That is the fastest DDR5 memory support of any processor instance in the cloud, according to AWS. Furthermore, Graviton5 is the first CPU in the AWS fleet to support PCIe Gen6. In addition to the M9g, AWS is introducing the M9gd variant, designed for workloads that require local NVMe SSD storage. This variant offers up to 11.4 TB of NVMe storage and delivers 30 percent higher IOPS and storage performance than the previous-generation M8gd.
The M9g and M9gd offer, on average, 15 percent higher network bandwidth and 20 percent higher Amazon EBS bandwidth compared to the previous generation. For the largest instance size, network bandwidth even doubles. Both instance types also support Instance Bandwidth Configuration (IBC), which allows users to adjust the bandwidth allocation between Amazon EBS and Amazon VPC networks by up to 25 percent. This is useful for workloads with specific bandwidth requirements, such as database read and write performance.
Formally verified cloud hypervisor
A notable new feature is the Nitro Isolation Engine. This is an extension of the Nitro System that enforces isolation between virtual machines via formal verification. This is a mathematical technique to prove that hardware or software behaves exactly as intended, not just in test scenarios. AWS positions this as the world’s first formally verified cloud hypervisor.
For agentic AI workloads, Graviton5 is also positioned as a suitable processor. With 33 percent lower inter-core latency and higher memory bandwidths, agents can execute more tasks in parallel.
The M9g and M9gd instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt) regions. They can be purchased via Savings Plans, On-Demand, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances, and Dedicated Hosts.
Tip: Amazon Redshift gets a Graviton boost with new RG instances