American technology company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, valued at $2.3trn in mid-2025. Its chief executive is Andy Jassy, handpicked by Bezos, who retired from the role in 2021 but remains executive chairman. Key businesses include the Prime subscription service and AWS cloud computing.
In 2023 the Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon over its Prime subscription programme, alleging the company had engineered its interface to trap consumers into memberships they had not chosen and could not easily escape. Internal documents described the approach as "misdirection": a large, prominent button reading "Get FREE Two-Day Shipping" that enrolled users in Prime, and a small grey text link, easy to miss, to decline. An internal memo recorded that making the process clearer was not the "right approach" because it would cause a "shock" to business performance. The cancellation process, which Amazon internally named the "Iliad Flow" after Homer's epic of the long Trojan war, required users to navigate four pages, six clicks and 15 separate options before reaching the exit. By Amazon's own accounting, 35m consumers had been enrolled without meaningful consent over seven years. The eventual settlement with the FTC, in September 2025, cost $2.5bn. See dark patterns.
Amazon is also one of the world's four largest sellers of advertising, alongside Google, Meta and ByteDance; together the four accounted for more than half the global advertising market in 2024.
In January 2025 Amazon told staff to return to the pre-pandemic norm of being in the office five days a week. Jassy has also said that AI will reduce Amazon's total corporate workforce in the next few years.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the dominant cloud-computing providers. In mid-2025 AWS cut the cost of renting its AI chips by between 25% and 45%.
Amazon has blocked OpenAI's crawlers from collecting information and is suing Perplexity, another AI firm, claiming that its Comet browser has been masquerading as a human on Amazon's website (which Perplexity denies). Andy Jassy has pilloried third-party AI shopping agents for lacking personalisation, wrong prices and wrong delivery estimates. Amazon offers its own assistant, Rufus, which it says has been used by 250m customers in 2025.
Amazon has earmarked $200bn of capital expenditure for 2026, the largest amount any company has ever committed in a single year, mostly aimed at supporting AWS in the race to build AI infrastructure including data centres and the power they rely on. JPMorgan Chase has dubbed it "Capexapalooza". Amazon has also said it will invest up to $50bn in OpenAI, nearly quadruple what Microsoft has committed to the maker of ChatGPT since 2019. AWS's sales grew at the fastest pace in more than three years in early 2026. With almost a third of the global market for cloud services, ahead of Azure and Google Cloud, AWS has much to gain if companies beyond Silicon Valley embrace AI more fully.
AWS offers customers ways to build on both OpenAI and Anthropic models, as well as its own model family, Nova. It also supports a variety of chips, including those of Nvidia and its cheaper in-house alternative, Trainium. Rufus, Amazon's agentic-AI shopping assistant, helped generate $12bn of incremental annualised sales in 2025. Shortly after Amazon struck its deal with OpenAI, the model-maker shelved plans to launch a shopping service called Instant Checkout.
Project Leo, rebranded from "Kuiper" in November 2025, is Amazon's satellite-broadband initiative, intended to challenge SpaceX's Starlink system. It will provide connectivity in remote areas. Amazon has around 250 satellites in orbit so far and plans a constellation of 3,200; it faces a regulatory deadline in July 2026 to have half of them deployed, for which it has requested an extension to 2028. SpaceX, by contrast, has more than 10,000 Starlink satellites in orbit and more than 10m customers.
On April 14th 2026 Amazon bought Globalstar, a satellite operator, for $11.6bn. Globalstar's satellites already provide connectivity to Apple's iPhones when they are out of range of terrestrial networks. The deal also gives Amazon access to Globalstar's radio spectrum. "Direct-to-device" connectivity is considered the hottest area of investment in the satellite business.
Its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said in favor of journalism in that by giving us the opinion of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community.