AWS News - 2026-05-27

Starting today, Amazon EC2 M8i and M8i-flex instances are now available in AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. These instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, available only on AWS, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud. The M8i and M8i-flex instances offer up to 15% better price-performance, and 2.5x more memory bandwidth compared to previous generation Intel-based instances. They deliver up to 20% better performance than M7i and M7i-flex instances, with even higher gains for specific workloads. The M8i and M8i-flex instances are up to 30% faster for PostgreSQL databases, up to 60% faster for NGINX web applications, and up to 40% faster for AI deep learning recommendation models compared to M7i and M7i-flex instances.

M8i-flex are the easiest way to get price performance benefits for a majority of general-purpose workloads like web and application servers, microservices, small and medium data stores, virtual desktops, and enterprise applications. They offer the most common sizes, from large to 16xlarge, and are a great first choice for applications that don't fully utilize all compute resources.

M8i instances are a great choice for all general purpose workloads, especially for workloads that need the largest instance sizes or continuous high CPU usage. The SAP-certified M8i instances offer 13 sizes including 2 bare metal sizes and the new 96xlarge size for the largest applications.

To get started, sign in to the AWS Management Console. For more information about the new instances, visit the M8i and M8i-flex instance page or visit the AWS News blog.

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R8i and R8i-flex instances are available in the AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region. These instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, available only on AWS, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud. The R8i and R8i-flex instances offer up to 15% better price-performance, and 2.5x more memory bandwidth compared to previous generation Intel-based instances. They deliver 20% higher performance than R7i instances, with even higher gains for specific workloads. They are up to 30% faster for PostgreSQL databases, up to 60% faster for NGINX web applications, and up to 40% faster for AI deep learning recommendation models compared to R7i.

R8i-flex, our first memory-optimized Flex instances, are the easiest way to get price performance benefits for a majority of memory-intensive workloads. They offer the most common sizes, from large to 16xlarge, and are a great first choice for applications that don't fully utilize all compute resources.

R8i instances are a great choice for all memory-intensive workloads, especially for workloads that need the largest instance sizes or continuous high CPU usage. R8i instances offer 13 sizes including 2 bare metal sizes and the new 96xlarge size for the largest applications. R8i instances are SAP-certified and deliver 142,100 aSAPS, delivering exceptional performance for mission-critical SAP workloads.

To get started, sign in to the AWS Management Console. For more information about the R8i and R8i-flex instances visit the AWS News blog.

Today, AWS announces the general availability of AWS Neuron 2.30.0, delivering NKI 0.4.0 with new AWS Trainium3 specific hardware capabilities, 22 new NKI Library kernels, and expanded Neuron Agentic Development skills for model porting and validation. This release is for ML developers building custom kernels, optimizing training and inference workloads, or porting models to AWS Trainium and Inferentia.

NKI 0.4.0 introduces the activate2 Scalar Engine instruction for Trn3, OCP FP8 input support for matrix multiplication, and bytes-aware tile-size constants that simplify kernel development. The NKI Library adds 3 new core kernels for segmented attention, KV-parallel prefill, and FP8 quantization, as well as 19 experimental kernels covering context parallelism, MXFP8 training, state-space models, and fused optimizers. PyTorch reference implementations are now available for 29 kernels.

Neuron Agentic Development, launched as a beta in April 2026, adds two new skills: neuron-framework-autoport for porting HuggingFace models to NxD Inference end to end, and neuron-framework-equivalence for validating numerical equivalence of ported models. By default, both are now included in all Neuron DLAMIs and Deep Learning Containers. This release also introduces the Neuron DRA Driver for Kubernetes Dynamic Resource Allocation, enabling topology-aware scheduling of Trainium accelerators and Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) interfaces. The Neuron Graph Compiler now delivers significant compile-time improvements, and the Neuron Runtime enables zero-copy host-device transfers by default.

AWS Neuron is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon EC2 Trn1, Trn2, Inf2, and Inf1 instances are available. For more information about Regional availability, see the AWS Region table.

To get started, see the following resources:

• AWS Neuron 2.30.0 Release Notes
• Neuron Kernel Interface (NKI) Documentation
• Neuron Agentic Development
• AWS Neuron