Which company owns the cloud-computing platform AWS?

Amazon owns the cloud-computing platform Amazon Web Services, commonly called AWS.

AWS began offering services to outside customers in 2006. It grew from Amazon’s internal need for scalable computing, storage, and database infrastructure into a major cloud business serving companies, governments, developers, and organizations worldwide.

Amazon remains best known to consumers for e-commerce, but AWS has been a crucial part of the company’s financial history. Its services include Amazon EC2 for computing capacity, Amazon S3 for object storage, and Amazon Aurora for relational databases. Customers generally pay for the resources they use rather than building all infrastructure themselves.

AWS is sometimes confused with Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, its principal large-scale competitors. The cloud division’s revenue and operating profit can materially affect Amazon’s overall valuation, making it important to discussions of Amazon’s market capitalization.