Builds the global infrastructure for shopping, cloud computing, digital services, advertising, and AI.
★★★★★
★★★★★
Growing
What Amazon.com, does
Amazon operates a global ecosystem spanning e-commerce, cloud computing, digital subscriptions, advertising, logistics, and AI infrastructure through Amazon Web Services.
Founded
1994
Seattle, Washington
CEO
Andy Jassy
Since 2021
Market cap
$2.75T
#6 in the world
Revenue (FY25)
$716.9B
+12% YoY
30-Second Summary
A plain-English explanation of Amazon's business model
If you only remember one thing
Amazon makes money by connecting consumers, sellers, businesses, advertisers, and developers through a massive digital and physical infrastructure. Its retail marketplace drives enormous customer traffic, while AWS provides high-margin cloud computing, advertising monetizes shopping intent, Prime creates recurring customer relationships, and logistics infrastructure makes the ecosystem harder to replicate. Amazon is increasingly using AI as another layer across AWS, advertising, shopping, robotics, and its custom chips.
Business Segments
Where Amazon.com,'s $716.9B Fiscal year 2025 (ended Dec 31, 2025) comes from
$716.9B
Fiscal year 2025
59.4% of revenue ·+10% YoY
22.6% of revenue ·+13% YoY
18% of revenue ·+20% YoY
Amazon's retail businesses still generate the majority of revenue, but AWS is disproportionately important to profitability and long-term growth. The combination of retail scale, cloud infrastructure, advertising, and logistics gives Amazon multiple engines for monetization.
Fiscal year 2025, ended December 31, 2025. Amazon's three reportable segments are North America, International, and AWS.
Business Model
How Amazon.com, makes money — the ecosystem flywheel
Attract Customers
Monetize the Ecosystem
Strengths & Risks
What makes Amazon.com, strong — and what could go wrong
Global Customer Scale
Serves hundreds of millions of customers through a massive global shopping and digital ecosystem
AWS
AWS provides a powerful cloud business with deep relationships across enterprises, startups, governments, and developers
Logistics Infrastructure
A massive fulfillment and delivery network creates speed, convenience, and infrastructure advantages that are difficult to replicate
Advertising Engine
Amazon monetizes high-intent shopping traffic through a rapidly growing advertising business
Ecosystem Flywheel
Customers, sellers, Prime, advertising, logistics, AWS, and AI reinforce one another and increase the value of the overall platform
Financial Overview
Fiscal year 2025 (ended Dec 31, 2025)
$716.9B
+12% YoY
FY25
$77.7B
+31% YoY
FY25
$11.2B
-71% YoY
FY25
Amazon's profitability improved sharply in 2025, but free cash flow fell as the company dramatically increased infrastructure investment. The central story is a trade-off between near-term cash generation and long-term spending on AWS, AI, logistics, and data centers.
Financial History
5-year trend, fiscal years 2021–2025
$716.9B
+52.6% since FY21
Business Ecosystem
Who Amazon.com, depends on — and who depends on Amazon.com,
NVIDIA
Provides GPUs and accelerated computing platforms used across AWS AI infrastructure
Anthropic
Provides advanced AI models that strengthen Amazon Bedrock and AWS's generative AI ecosystem
TSMC
A key semiconductor manufacturing partner within the broader supply chain supporting Amazon's custom silicon and advanced computing ecosystem
Amazon
The global ecosystem
Competitors
Companies that compete with Amazon across retail, e-commerce, cloud computing, advertising, and AI infrastructure. Market caps are approximate current snapshots.
Walmart
$1T
Direct retail competitor — competes with Amazon on price, selection, fulfillment, grocery, and omnichannel commerce
Microsoft
$2.89T
Direct AWS competitor — Azure competes with AWS for enterprise cloud, AI infrastructure, developers, and large workloads
Alphabet
$4.2T
Cloud and AI competitor — Google Cloud competes with AWS while Google's advertising and AI businesses overlap with Amazon's advertising and cloud ecosystem
