Amazon operates the world's largest online retail marketplace and launched Amazon Web Services in 2006.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore, and the company began selling books from a garage in Bellevue, Washington. It expanded into many categories, building a broad marketplace that includes products sold directly by Amazon and by independent third-party merchants.
Amazon Web Services began with services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. AWS became a major cloud-computing business, providing infrastructure to companies, governments, and developers around the world.
Amazon's market capitalization reflects expectations about its retail, cloud, advertising, logistics, and subscription businesses. The company is not the same as Alibaba, which operates a separate Chinese-founded commerce ecosystem, although both are major online retail companies.