Amazon operates AWS, the world's largest cloud-computing platform by revenue for many years.
Amazon Web Services launched in 2006 with services that let businesses rent computing power, storage, and other infrastructure over the internet. Instead of buying and maintaining all their own servers, customers could scale resources up or down and pay for what they used.
AWS became a major profit engine for Amazon, supporting startups, governments, media companies, banks, and large enterprises. Its services include compute, databases, storage, networking, analytics, and machine learning.
Amazon began as an online bookstore in 1994 and expanded into a broad retail, logistics, advertising, entertainment, and cloud company. Because Amazon reports AWS separately, investors can evaluate the cloud division alongside the lower-margin retail business when assessing the company's value.