Amazon EC2 Marks Its 20th Anniversary

Amazon EC2, which started in 2006 with a single instance type and region, has expanded to over 1,200 instance types and 39 regions worldwide over the past 20 years. During this period, proprietary hardware technologies such as the AWS Nitro System and Graviton processors were introduced to enhance performance and security.

Over the last five years, the focus has been on optimizing AI workloads, building large-scale inference and training environments through the AWS Inferentia and Trainium chips. In particular, Trainium3 supports the training and serving of state-of-the-art frontier models by connecting up to 144 chips.

Additionally, EC2 Mac instances provide a cloud build environment for Apple developers, while the Graviton5 chip offers high CPU performance suitable for agentic AI workloads. EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML improved ML accessibility through a new usage model that allows users to reserve GPU capacity.