Amazon, founded in 1994, became one of the world's largest companies by market capitalization through e-commerce and cloud computing.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore, and the company began selling books from a garage in Bellevue, Washington, in 1995. It expanded rapidly into many product categories, turning its retail marketplace into a global shopping platform. Amazon Web Services, launched in 2006, added a major cloud-computing business serving companies, governments, and developers.
Amazon’s market capitalization reflects expectations about future profits as well as current sales. That makes it different from a simple ranking by revenue. Alibaba, eBay, and Shopify are also major digital-commerce companies, but they are separate businesses with different origins and operating models. Amazon is incorporated in Washington and is listed on Nasdaq under AMZN.