Amazon
Amazon.com, Inc., trading as Amazon, is an American multinational technology conglomerate operating in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, entertainment and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevue, Washington, it began as an online bookseller and expanded to cover virtually all consumer product categories, positioning itself as the Everything Store.
| Amazon.com, Inc. | |
|---|---|
| Type | Public |
| Traded as | Nasdaq: AMZN |
| Industry | E-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, artificial intelligence |
| Founded | 5 July 1994, Bellevue, Washington |
| Founder | Jeff Bezos |
| Headquarters | Seattle, Washington and Arlington, Virginia, United States |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Andy Jassy (president and CEO), Jeff Bezos (executive chairman) |
| Products | Kindle, Echo, Fire tablets, Fire TV |
| Services | Amazon Web Services, Amazon Prime, Prime Video, Amazon Pharmacy |
| Subsidiaries | Amazon Web Services, Whole Foods Market, Twitch, IMDb, Ring, Audible, Amazon MGM Studios, Zoox, Kuiper Systems |
| Website | amazon.com |
As of 2026 Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world and the largest company in the world by revenue. It is the second largest private employer in the United States and became a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average on 26 February 2024.
The company has a reputation as an industry disruptor built on innovation and the aggressive reinvestment of profits rather than their distribution. It has also been criticised extensively over working conditions, opposition to unionisation, surveillance partnerships, environmental impact, anticompetitive conduct and its treatment of small businesses and suppliers.
History
Founding and early growth, 1994 to 2010
Amazon was founded on 5 July 1994 as Cadabra by Jeff Bezos, who relocated from New York City to Bellevue, Washington, to operate an online bookstore. He chose the Seattle area for its supply of technical talent from Microsoft and the University of Washington, its relatively small population, and its proximity to a major book distribution warehouse in Roseburg, Oregon. Seattle was selected over Portland and Boulder.
In November 1994 Bezos renamed the company Amazon, after the largest river in the world, to reflect his ambitions for its scale. The website launched on 16 July 1995, sourcing books directly from wholesalers and publishers, and the company went public in May 1997.
Amazon began selling music and video in 1998 and started international operations by acquiring online booksellers in the United Kingdom and Germany. In 1999 it expanded into video games, consumer electronics, home improvement, software and toys.
Two early partnerships illustrated the tensions of its marketplace model. In 2000 Toys "R" Us entered a ten-year agreement worth 50 million dollars a year plus a share of sales, under which it would be the exclusive supplier of toys and baby products and its own website would redirect to Amazon. In 2004 Toys "R" Us sued, alleging that Amazon had knowingly permitted third-party sellers to offer items in categories where exclusivity had been granted. A court found for Toys "R" Us in 2006, allowing it to unwind the agreement and establish its own site, and it was later awarded 51 million dollars in damages. A comparable arrangement with Borders, under which Amazon co-managed Borders.com from 2001, ended when Borders withdrew in 2007.
The most consequential development of the decade was not in retail. In 2002 the company launched Amazon Web Services, initially providing interfaces for developers to build applications on top of the e-commerce platform. AWS expanded in 2004 to offer website popularity statistics and web crawler data, then shifted decisively toward enterprise infrastructure with Simple Storage Service in 2006 and Elastic Compute Cloud in 2008, allowing companies to rent storage and computing capacity rather than buy it. AWS became the foundation of the cloud computing industry and, for many years, the source of the large majority of Amazon's operating profit.
In 2006 Amazon launched Fulfilment by Amazon, allowing individuals and small companies to sell through its warehouses and logistics network, which converted its fixed distribution investment into a service sold to competitors. It bought Audible for approximately 300 million dollars in March 2008 and introduced the AmazonBasics private label in 2009.
Expansion, 2011 to 2020
On 18 October 2011 Amazon announced a partnership with DC Comics for exclusive digital rights to titles including Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Sandman and Watchmen, prompting booksellers including Barnes & Noble to remove those titles from their shelves.
It acquired the warehouse automation company Kiva Systems in 2012, Goodreads in March 2013 and Twitch for 970 million dollars in August 2014. In November 2013 it announced a partnership with the United States Postal Service for Sunday delivery, beginning in Los Angeles and New York.
Amazon opened a physical bookstore at University Village in Seattle in November 2015 and its tenth by 2017, closing all of them in 2022 together with its Amazon 4-Star locations. In July 2016 it announced a 1.1 million square foot facility in Palmer Township in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, where it became the region's third largest employer.
In June 2017 Nike agreed to sell through Amazon in exchange for stronger action against counterfeit goods. The arrangement was unsuccessful and Nike withdrew in November 2019. IKEA and Birkenstock ended their own arrangements around the same time, citing similar frustrations over business practices and counterfeits.
Recent years, 2021 onward
On 5 July 2021 Bezos moved from chief executive to executive chairman and was succeeded by Andy Jassy, previously chief executive of AWS. In September 2021 the company launched Astro, its first household robot.
Cost reduction became a recurring theme. In January 2023 Amazon cut more than 18,000 jobs, principally in consumer retail and human resources. On 28 October 2025 it announced a reduction of 14,000 corporate positions, its largest round since 2022, followed in January 2026 by approximately 16,000 further corporate redundancies. Company statements described these as part of an effort to streamline operations, reduce bureaucracy and adapt to changing conditions including artificial intelligence, with affected employees offered severance and internal placement support.
Artificial intelligence became the dominant strategic priority. Amazon invested 1.25 billion dollars in Anthropic in 2023, in return for which Anthropic designated AWS as a primary cloud partner and adopted Amazon's Trainium and Inferentia chips, with Claude models made available through Amazon Bedrock. Further investments of 2.75 billion dollars in March 2024, four billion dollars in November 2024 and five billion dollars in April 2026 followed. In January 2026 Amazon entered talks to invest up to 50 billion dollars in OpenAI, a competitor of Anthropic. In February 2024 it launched its first shopping chatbot, Rufus, available in the United States, India and the United Kingdom.
Healthcare expanded through RXPass, a prescription delivery service launched in January 2023, and prescription vending machines at One Medical clinics in Los Angeles from 8 October 2025, operated by Amazon Pharmacy and dispensing common medications including antibiotics, inhalers and blood pressure treatments.
Physical retail contracted. In January 2026 Amazon announced the closure of all Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores, affecting 57 Fresh stores and 15 Go locations, some to be converted to Whole Foods Market, in order to concentrate on same-day delivery and the Whole Foods business.
On 8 November 2023 a plan was adopted for Bezos to sell approximately 50 million shares over the following year, beginning with 12 million shares for about two billion dollars. In March 2026 Amazon pledged to bear the entire cost of new electricity generation required to power its data centres. In August 2026 it announced that Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourcing platform launched in 2005 and widely used for human data annotation in machine learning, would be discontinued on 30 September 2026 after more than 21 years.
Operations
Amazon's principal segments are the online store, physical stores, third-party seller services, subscription services including Amazon Prime, advertising, and Amazon Web Services. Prime had 200 million subscribers worldwide when the company overtook Walmart as the largest retailer outside China in 2021.
Subsidiaries include AWS, Zoox in autonomous vehicles, Kuiper Systems in satellite internet, Amazon Lab126 in hardware research, Ring, Twitch, IMDb and Whole Foods Market. Media is distributed through Prime Video, MGM+, Amazon Music, Twitch, Audible and Wondery. The company publishes books through Amazon Publishing, produces film and television through Amazon MGM Studios including the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, and manufactures consumer electronics including Kindle e-readers, Echo devices and Fire tablets and televisions.
As of October 2024 Amazon was the twelfth most visited website in the world, with 84 per cent of its traffic originating in the United States.
Controversies
Working conditions
Conditions in Amazon's fulfilment centres have been the subject of investigation and regulatory action in multiple countries. Criticism has centred on productivity quotas enforced by automated tracking, rates of workplace injury above industry averages, limited breaks in facilities covering hundreds of thousands of square feet, and the use of temporary and agency labour. Regulators in the United States, including the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, have cited the company over ergonomic hazards, and parliamentary inquiries in the United Kingdom, France and Germany have examined similar concerns. Amazon disputes the characterisation, citing its wage levels, safety investment and internal injury data.
Opposition to unionisation
Amazon has consistently opposed union organisation among its employees. The Amazon Labor Union won recognition at a Staten Island warehouse in 2022, the first successful union vote at an American Amazon facility, which the company challenged. On 19 December 2024 Amazon workers led by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters struck in at least four states. Labour boards have issued complaints concerning the company's conduct during organising campaigns, including allegations of surveillance, captive audience meetings and retaliatory dismissal.
Antitrust
In September 2023 the Federal Trade Commission and seventeen states sued Amazon, alleging that it maintained monopoly power through practices that punished sellers for offering lower prices elsewhere and that effectively required them to use its fulfilment services to obtain Prime eligibility. The European Commission separately investigated the company's use of third-party seller data to inform its own retail decisions and its treatment of the Buy Box, settling in 2022 with binding commitments. Amazon denies operating anticompetitively and argues that it competes with the whole of retail.
Treatment of sellers and private label products
Investigations have reported that Amazon used data from independent sellers on its marketplace to develop competing private label products, a practice the company denied before United States congressional committees, and that the accuracy of those denials was later questioned by legislators. Sellers have also complained of arbitrary account suspensions, fee increases and the difficulty of obtaining resolution through automated systems.
Counterfeit goods
The open marketplace model has made Amazon a significant channel for counterfeit products, leading brands including Nike, IKEA and Birkenstock to withdraw. The company has invested in detection and verification programmes and has brought joint actions against counterfeiters with rights holders, while critics argue that the incentive structure of a commission-based marketplace works against effective enforcement.
Surveillance partnerships
Ring, the doorbell camera subsidiary, entered partnerships with more than a thousand American police departments facilitating access to resident camera footage, arrangements criticised by civil liberties organisations as creating a privately owned surveillance network without democratic oversight. Amazon subsequently restricted the mechanism by which police can request footage. The company's Rekognition facial recognition service was also criticised over accuracy across demographic groups and sales to law enforcement, and Amazon imposed a moratorium on police use in 2020.
Product reviews
The integrity of Amazon product reviews has been a persistent problem, with organised markets for fake reviews operating through social media groups. Amazon has brought legal action against brokers and sellers and removes large numbers of reviews, but independent analyses continue to find substantial proportions of unreliable reviews in some categories.
Environmental impact
Amazon's logistics network, packaging volume and data centre electricity consumption have drawn environmental criticism, including from its own employees through the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, whose members reported being threatened with dismissal for speaking publicly. The company established the Climate Pledge, committing to net zero carbon by 2040, and has invested in renewable generation and electric delivery vehicles.
Taxation
Amazon's effective tax rates and its use of European structures, particularly in Luxembourg, have been examined by the European Commission, which in 2017 ordered the recovery of 250 million euros in what it held to be unlawful state aid, a decision annulled by the General Court in 2021.
See also
References