Content: Analysis

Graviton5 continues Amazon’s implicit x86 replacement programme

Chris Evans

15 Jan 2026 — 5 min read

At Reinvent 2025, AWS announced Graviton5, the next generation of Arm-based CPUs for EC2. The latest iteration improves performance over Graviton4 by 25%, with a redesign that abandons the NUMA architecture of its predecessor. With more new capacity of Graviton being deployed in AWS each year compared to x86, will AWS eventually be able to convert all customers to its custom silicon and displace x86 entirely?

Background

AWS first announced Graviton-branded Arm-based processors at Reinvent in 2018. The development was and still is led by Annapurna Labs, a start-up acquired by Amazon in 2015.

As shown in our timeline below, Graviton has evolved from an initial design implementing 16 Cortex-A72 cores at 2.3Ghz, to the Graviton4 based on the Arm Neoverse V2 architecture (Armv9.0) with 96 cores, DDR-5 5600 DRAM, and support for PCIe 5.0 (which also includes CXL 3.0).

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