Amazon owns the e-commerce and cloud businesses Amazon.com and AWS.
Amazon began as an online bookstore and expanded into a broad marketplace selling goods in many categories. Amazon Web Services, usually called AWS, became a separate growth engine by offering on-demand computing, storage, databases, and other internet infrastructure to organizations worldwide.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, and the company began operating online in 1995. Its expansion also included logistics, digital entertainment, consumer devices, advertising, and subscription services such as Amazon Prime.
Amazon’s combination of retail scale, cloud computing, and other businesses has helped it rank among the world’s most valuable companies by market capitalization. Market value is not the same as annual sales or assets; it reflects what investors collectively value the company’s publicly traded equity at a given time.