Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer by revenue and operates Amazon Web Services.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore. The company expanded into an enormous marketplace selling products from its own operations and third-party merchants, while also building logistics, devices, streaming, advertising, and subscription businesses.
Amazon Web Services, usually called AWS, provides cloud computing and related services to companies, governments, and developers. AWS became a major profit engine and helped make Amazon more than a conventional retail business.
Amazon is often among the world’s most valuable companies by market capitalization. Revenue rankings and market-cap rankings measure different things: revenue records sales, while market capitalization reflects the stock market’s value of the company’s outstanding shares.