Cloud VM benchmarks 2026: performance / price

A comprehensive 2026 benchmark comparison of cloud VM performance and price-to-performance ratios across 7 providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, Akamai/Linode, DigitalOcean, Hetzner) and 44 VM types. AMD EPYC Turin dominates single-thread and multi-thread performance, with AWS C8a (non-SMT Turin) being the fastest overall. For value, Hetzner and Oracle lead on-demand pricing, while GCP and Azure compete well on reserved and spot instances. ARM solutions like Google Axion and Azure Cobalt 100 offer strong performance-per-dollar. Intel Granite Rapids improves on Emerald Rapids' inconsistency. Spot instances offer the best cost efficiency across all providers. Practical recommendations are given per use case and per provider.