Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week launched a new generation of compute instances powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors, offering significant performance gains and increased storage capacity. The new Amazon EC2 C8id, M8id and R8id instances are now generally available, according to announcements made on February 4th and February 10th, 2026.
The instances deliver up to 43% higher performance and 3.3 times more memory bandwidth compared to previous generation C6id, M6id, and R6id instances, AWS stated. They offer up to 384 vCPUs, 3TiB of memory, and 22.8TB of NVMe SSD storage – a threefold increase over the previous generation. This increased storage capacity is achieved through NVMe-based SSD block-level instance storage physically connected to the host server.
AWS is positioning the C8id instances for compute-intensive workloads such as video encoding, image manipulation, and high-performance web servers. M8id instances are designed for balanced workloads including application servers, microservices, and medium-sized data stores. The R8id instances are optimized for memory-intensive tasks like large-scale SQL and NoSQL databases, in-memory databases, and real-time big data analytics.
The new instances similarly deliver performance improvements for specific workloads. AWS claims up to 46% higher performance for I/O intensive database workloads and up to 30% faster query results for I/O intensive real-time data analytics compared to sixth-generation instances. They also support Instance Bandwidth Configuration, allowing for a 25% flexible allocation between network and EBS bandwidth.
Initial availability of the C8id, M8id, and R8id instances is in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon). R8id instances are also available in Europe (Frankfurt). As of February 10th, C8id and M8id instances have expanded to Europe (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo), with M8id also available in Europe (Spain). R8id instances are now available in Europe (Spain) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) as well.
Customers can purchase the new instances via Savings Plans, On-Demand instances, and Spot instances. AWS also announced price reductions for its Network Firewall service, including hourly and data processing discounts on NAT Gateways service-chained with Network Firewall secondary endpoints, and the removal of additional data processing charges for Advanced Inspection, which enables TLS inspection of encrypted network traffic.
Alongside the new EC2 instances, AWS announced the availability of Claude Opus 4.6, Anthropic’s most intelligent model to date, within Amazon Bedrock. Bedrock also now supports structured outputs, providing consistent, machine-readable responses from foundation models adhering to user-defined JSON schemas.
