Announcing metal-48xl and metal-96xl for Amazon EC2 network/EBS instances

Posted on: Jun 9, 2026

AWS is announcing the general availability of metal-48xl and metal-96xl sizes for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M8in, M8ib, M8idn, M8idb, R8in, R8ib, R8idn, and R8idb instances. These instances are powered by custom sixth generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, available only on AWS and feature the latest sixth generation AWS Nitro cards. These instances deliver up to 43% better compute performance per vCPU compared to previous generation M6in, M6idn, R6in, and R6idn instances.

M8in, M8idn, R8in, R8idn instances deliver 600 Gbps network bandwidth, the highest network bandwidth among enhanced networking EC2 instances. M8in and R8in instances are ideal for workloads such as real-time big data analytics, distributed web scale in-memory caches, caching fleets for AI/ML clusters, and Telco applications such as 5G User Plane Function (UPF). M8idn and R8idn instances are ideal for network-intensive general purpose workloads requiring local storage, such as distributed compute, data analytics, and high-performance file systems.

M8ib, M8idb, R8ib, R8idb instances deliver up to 300Gbps EBS bandwidth, the highest among non-accelerated compute EC2 instances. M8ib and R8ib instances are best suited for workloads that benefit from high block storage performance, such as high-performance file systems and NoSQL databases. M8idb and R8idb instances are ideal for storage-intensive general purpose workloads such as large commercial databases, data lakes, and NoSQL databases that benefit from both high EBS throughput and low-latency local NVMe storage.

M8in, M8ib, M8idn, M8idb, R8in, R8ib, R8idn, and R8idb instances support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) networking on 48xlarge, 96xlarge, metal-48xl, and metal-96xl sizes. EFA networking enables lower latency and improved cluster performance for workloads deployed on tightly coupled clusters.

The new metal-48xl and metal-96xl sizes are available in the AWS US East (N. Virginia) region. To get started, see AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), and AWS SDKs.