Amazon Redshift Launches Graviton-Powered RG Instances, Promises 2.2x Speed Boost and 30% Cost Cut

Breaking News – Amazon Web Services today announced Amazon Redshift RG instances, a new instance family powered by AWS Graviton processors. The new instances deliver up to 2.2x faster data warehouse performance and a 30% lower price per vCPU compared to the current RA3 instances. They also feature an integrated data lake query engine that enables unified SQL analytics across data warehouses and data lakes.

“Organizations are grappling with exploding query volumes driven by both human analysts and AI agents. RG instances directly address this by providing a single, faster, and more cost-effective engine for all analytics workloads,” said John Smith, Vice President of Analytics at AWS.

Background

Amazon Redshift has evolved over a decade from dense compute instances to RA3 and serverless options. Each generation aims to reduce cost and increase speed per query. However, the rise of AI agents – which generate far more queries than human users – has escalated operational costs.

Data volumes continue to grow, and many organizations maintain both structured warehouse tables and diverse data lakes. Until now, querying both often required separate engines. RG instances close that gap with a built-in data lake query engine that delivers up to 2.4x faster performance for Apache Iceberg and up to 1.5x faster for Apache Parquet compared to RA3.

What This Means

Customers can reduce total analytics costs by running warehouse and data lake workloads on a single system. The instance family includes models such as rg.xlarge (4 vCPU, 32 GB) for small departmental analytics and rg.4xlarge (16 vCPU, 128 GB) for standard production workloads.

“By unifying query engines and optimizing for AI-driven traffic, RG instances provide a future-proof foundation for modern analytics,” added Smith. The new instances are available now through the AWS Management Console, CLI, or API. Existing RA3 clusters can be migrated directly.

Key Specifications at a Glance

• Performance: Up to 2.2x faster than RA3 instances
• Cost: 30% lower price per vCPU
• Data lake query engine: Integrated by default, up to 2.4x faster for Apache Iceberg
• Use cases: BI dashboards, ETL, near-real-time analytics, AI agent workloads

For pricing estimates, AWS recommends the Pricing Calculator with specific workload patterns.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.