AWS Graviton5 GA: 192 cores, 25% perf boost, formally verified VM isolation

AWS made Graviton5 generally available on June 22, delivering 25% better compute performance than Graviton4 with 192 cores per chip, built on TSMC's 3nm process. Meta has committed to deploying tens of millions of Graviton5 cores for agentic AI workloads, while Uber and Snowflake are also adopting the platform. Instances (M9g general-purpose, M9gd storage-focused) include DDR5-8800 memory, PCIe Gen 6, and 33% lower inter-core latency.

Real-world customer benchmarks show concrete gains: ClickHouse achieved 36% performance improvement with zero code changes; HubSpot saw MySQL query duration drop by up to 60%; Honeycomb achieved 36% better throughput per core in production observability workloads. M9g pricing is 9% more expensive than M8g, yielding roughly 15% better price-performance per dollar. M9g instances deliver 35% faster web applications and 30% faster databases compared to Graviton4.

The standout security innovation is the Nitro Isolation Engine—mathematically proven hypervisor isolation via formal verification. AWS provides formal proofs that VMs are isolated from each other and AWS operators, making Graviton5 the first major public cloud CPU to carry formally verified isolation in production. For multi-tenant or untrusted workload execution, this is a stronger guarantee than competing instances.

AWS custom silicon now accounts for over $20 billion in annual revenue, with Graviton representing more than half of new CPU capacity added to AWS for the past three years. Compute-optimized C9g and memory-optimized R9g variants arrive later in 2026. Architects running agentic systems, real-time inference, or databases at scale should evaluate Graviton5's cache and latency gains against GPU requirements and cost per transaction.