Amazon is the company founded in 1994 as Cadabra, Inc. that became a global e-commerce and cloud-computing giant.
Jeff Bezos founded the business in Bellevue, Washington, initially choosing books as its first product category. The company was renamed Amazon in 1994 before launching its website in 1995. It expanded from online bookselling into a broad marketplace, logistics network, consumer devices, digital media, and subscription services.
Amazon Web Services, or AWS, launched in the mid-2000s and became a major provider of on-demand computing, storage, databases, and related infrastructure. The combination of retail scale and highly profitable cloud services helped Amazon become one of the world’s largest public companies by market capitalization.
Amazon is often confused with Alibaba because both operate large online-commerce businesses. Amazon’s corporate history began in the United States, while Alibaba was founded in China in 1999. Walmart is a major retailer but did not begin as an internet company.