Amazon owns the cloud-computing platform AWS, a major contributor to its market capitalization.
Amazon Web Services provides computing power, storage, databases, networking, analytics, and other services over the internet. It serves startups, governments, universities, and large corporations, allowing them to rent infrastructure rather than build every data center themselves.
AWS began offering services publicly in the mid-2000s and became one of Amazon’s most profitable business divisions. Its financial performance has helped investors evaluate Amazon as more than an online retailer, since the company also operates advertising, logistics, devices, entertainment, and subscription businesses.
Amazon remains one of the world’s largest public companies by market value. It is sometimes confused with Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, which are competing cloud platforms owned by Microsoft and Alphabet respectively.