AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon EC2 M8azn instances, new open weights models in Amazon Bedrock, and more (February 16, 2026) | Amazon Web Services

AWS offers over 1,160 EC2 instance types as of February 2026.

M8azn instances are generally available; they use fifth-generation AMD EPYC processors, reach up to 5 GHz CPU frequency, and are built on the AWS Nitro System with sixth-generation Nitro Cards.

Compared with M5zn, M8azn deliver up to 2× compute, 4.3× memory bandwidth, 10× larger L3 cache, up to 2× networking throughput, and up to 3× EBS throughput.

M8azn provide a 4:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio, come in nine sizes (2–96 vCPUs) with up to 384 GiB memory, include two bare-metal variants, and target workloads such as real-time financial analytics, high-performance computing, high-frequency trading, CI/CD pipelines, gaming, and simulation modeling.

Amazon Bedrock adds six fully managed open-weight models (DeepSeek V3.2, MiniMax M2.1, GLM 4.7, GLM 4.7 Flash, Kimi K2.5, Qwen3 Coder Next), expands AWS PrivateLink support to include the bedrock-mantle endpoint powered by Project Mantle, and offers DeepSeek V3.2, MiniMax M2.1, and Qwen3 Coder Next in Kiro; Project Mantle provides serverless distributed inference with QoS controls.