AWS's Amazon EC2 Cloud Computing Service Turns 20 Years Old

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is celebrating a major milestone - its Amazon EC2 cloud computing service has reached its 20th birthday. The service was first launched in 2006 with a single instance type and one region, but it has since grown to over 1,200 instance types and 39 regions globally.

In the past five years, AWS has continued to push the boundaries of what cloud computing can deliver. In 2019, the company introduced purpose-built ML inference instances with AWS Inferentia chips, followed by Amazon EC2 Inf2 instances in April 2023 for large-scale generative AI inference workloads.

The company also launched Mac instances in 2020, built on Apple Mac mini with Intel Core i7 (Coffee Lake) on the AWS Nitro System. These were later replaced by Arm-based macOS instances, and more recently, M2 Pro Mac instances followed in 2023, M4 and M4 Pro Mac instances in 2025, and M3 Ultra Mac instances and M4 Max Mac instances in 2026.

AWS has also continued to innovate with the launch of EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML in 2023. This new usage model allows customers to reserve GPU capacity for future use, making it easier to access GPU instances to train and deploy machine learning models.