Amazon’s 2018 market-cap rise was closely associated with the success of its cloud business, Amazon Web Services, or AWS.
Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 as an online bookstore. It expanded into a broad retail marketplace, logistics network, digital-media company, hardware maker, and cloud-computing provider. AWS, launched in 2006, supplied computing, storage, databases, and other infrastructure to businesses and organizations.
Investors paid close attention to AWS because its margins were often higher than those of Amazon’s retail operations. Its profits helped demonstrate that Amazon was more than an online shop and supported the company’s rapid increase in market capitalization during the late 2010s.
Amazon joined the group of companies valued above $1 trillion in September 2018. That milestone is sometimes confused with Apple’s earlier achievement in August, but Amazon was the second U.S. company to pass the threshold.