July 6, 2025, Seattle Amazon Web Services has announced the official launch of Graviton5, its newest in-house ARM-based processor designed to power EC2 instances. The chip delivers up to 40 percent better compute performance and 35 percent greater energy efficiency compared to its predecessor, Graviton4.
The Graviton5 will debut in the new EC2 G5g and M8g instance families, now available in preview across four AWS regions, including US-East, US-West, Frankfurt and Tokyo.
What’s New in Graviton5
- 96-core ARMv9 architecture, built on 3nm process technology
- Advanced SIMD acceleration for AI inference and media encoding
- Support for DDR5 memory and PCIe Gen 5 I/O
- Dedicated security core with Nitro Guard integration
“Graviton5 is the most powerful and efficient chip we’ve built,” said Dave Brown, VP of EC2 at AWS. “It enables faster, greener, and more cost-effective workloads at scale.”
Performance Benchmarks
Internal benchmarks showed that G5g instances delivered up to 40 percent performance improvement in Java and Node.js workloads. Machine learning inference tasks ran up to 28 percent faster on TensorFlow and PyTorch frameworks.
The chip also reduced latency in Redis and MySQL deployments by as much as 22 percent compared to equivalent Graviton4 configurations.
Developer and Industry Adoption
Popular container platforms like ECS, EKS, and Lambda already support Graviton5. AWS has also released updated AMIs with native optimization for Ubuntu 24.04, Amazon Linux 2025 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.
Enterprise users in fintech, media streaming and SaaS are among the first adopters. Bloomberg, Netflix and Shopify confirmed early adoption of the new instance types during internal testing.
Environmental Benefits
Graviton5 was designed with sustainability in mind. AWS estimates that switching to Graviton-based instances can reduce carbon emissions by 60 percent per workload compared to x86 equivalents, based on internal energy usage audits.
Conclusion
With the launch of Graviton5, AWS is doubling down on custom silicon as a strategic advantage in the cloud market. The new processor pushes performance boundaries while improving energy efficiency, making it an attractive option for modern workloads at hyperscale.
