Amazon operates AWS and became the second U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization.
Amazon crossed the $1 trillion mark on September 4, 2018, following Apple’s milestone the previous month. The company’s market value was supported by its large e-commerce operation, growing cloud business, advertising activities, and subscription services.
Amazon Web Services, commonly called AWS, began offering services in 2006. It provides computing power, storage, databases, and other infrastructure through the internet. AWS became a major source of Amazon’s operating profit and an important competitor to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and initially operated as an online bookstore. It expanded into many retail categories and later developed devices such as Kindle and Echo. The trillion-dollar milestone concerns market capitalization, not the total value of merchandise sold through Amazon’s marketplace.