Amazon is the parent organization of Amazon Web Services, the cloud business that helped drive its market value.
Amazon Web Services, usually called AWS, provides computing power, storage, databases, networking, and other services over the internet. Amazon introduced AWS publicly in 2006, helping establish cloud infrastructure as a major technology industry rather than requiring every organization to buy and operate its own servers.
AWS is a segment of Amazon, not a separate publicly traded company. Its operating results have become an important part of how investors assess Amazon because the cloud division has often produced a large share of the company's operating income, even when retail margins were comparatively thin.
Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and began as an online bookseller. Its expansion into retail, logistics, advertising, devices, and cloud computing helped make it one of the world's most valuable companies by market capitalization.