Railway has launched Metal Gen 2, a major infrastructure upgrade that delivers 5x more compute capacity, 5x more network throughput, and significantly improved CPU-to-memory ratios compared to Gen 1. The upgrade was driven by three pressures: more demanding workloads (vector DBs, AI agents, inference proxies), a RAM price tripling in late 2025, and a parabolic demand spike in Q1 2026. Gen 2 uses AMD Zen 5c EPYC CPUs with 96 cores, DDR5, 12 NVMe drives per storage box, and dual 100G ConnectX-6 NICs. Sites are live in US West, US East, and Amsterdam, with Gen 1 sites remaining operational alongside their Gen 2 partners. About 13% of Railway containers are already on Gen 2 as of June 1. Prices have not been raised, and customers should see faster deployments and more consistent performance without any configuration changes.
