What AWS processor family first released in 2018 uses Amazon-designed Arm CPUs?

The AWS processor family first released in 2018 with Amazon-designed Arm CPUs is AWS Graviton.

AWS Graviton is a family of 64-bit Arm-based server processors designed by Annapurna Labs, the semiconductor company Amazon acquired in 2015. AWS developed the chips for its cloud infrastructure, giving customers an alternative to x86 processors from Intel and AMD.

The first Graviton processor became available in 2018 through Amazon EC2’s A1 instance family. That initial chip had 16 Arm Cortex-A72 cores running at 2.3 GHz and was aimed at workloads such as open-source software and non-performance-critical scripting. It was not sold as a general consumer processor.

The name can be confused with later generations: Graviton2 was announced in 2019, Graviton3 arrived in 2022, and newer versions continue the same custom-Arm strategy. Azure Cobalt and Google Axion are competing cloud-designed Arm processor families, while Intel Xeon is an x86 processor line, not an Arm-based AWS family.