Unsatisfied with AWS’s choice of 850+ EC2 instances types?

Public cloud’s biggest hyperscaler just took its “G7” instances to general availability – albeit only in its US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon) regions.

The new instances are AWS’s first offering of compute underpinned by NVIDIA’s Blackwell server GPUs – and intended for meaty AI inference work.

Networking is handled by AWS’s Nitro System which handles networking, storage, and other I/O functions, and can, it added, “deploy firmware updates, bug fixes, and optimizations while it remains operational…”

AWS said the G7 instance can be deployed as “on-demand instances, as part of savings plans, or spot instances” (on paper; inference demand is so rampant that The Stack cannot imagine much capacity is available) and can be provisioned with up to 8 GPUs per instance and up to 700 Gbps of networking throughput” – seven times more than its G6 instances. 

The general availability makes AWS, it boasted, the “first major cloud provider to support NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs.”

It will cost you, though. (AWS pricing, June 22, below.)

NVIDIA in May reported data centre revenue of $75 billion, up 92% year over year and 21% sequentially, driven by Blackwell architecture demand.

Executives boasted on May 20 that “Microsoft's Farweave, the world's most powerful AI data center, is now live ahead of schedule [and] powered by hundreds of thousands of Blackwell GPUs. Starting this year, AWS will add more than one million Blackwell and Rubin GPUs and are [sic] collaborating on spectrum networking. At Google, Blackwell will be offered to customers in the cloud including confidential computing capability, they added on the call.

AWS is making prepackaged GPU drivers for AI inference and graphics workloads available via its AWS Deep Learning AMIs (DLAMI) or NVIDIA Workstation AMIs; for EKS, users can build EKS AMIs with NVIDIA driver version R595 with EKS-provided automation. Users can deploy Amazon Linux, Ubuntu, RHEL, and Windows Server as operating systems with G7.