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Amazon Web Services

AWS is Amazon's comprehensive cloud platform offering compute, storage, and GPU-accelerated AI services worldwide.

Updated April 2026

Overview

Founded
2006
Headquarters
Seattle, WA
Segment
Hyperscale Cloud Platforms

Product overview

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides over 200 services spanning compute (EC2), storage (S3), databases, analytics, networking, ML, and GPU instances like P5 with NVIDIA H100 for AI training/inference, serving enterprises, startups, governments in 190 countries., It holds 31% global cloud market share, distinguished by vast scale, global regions/Availability Zones, pay-as-you-go flexibility, and mature ecosystem vs Azure/GCP., Users include NASA, Netflix, enterprises leveraging EC2 UltraClusters for HPC/AI.

Revenue model

Pay-as-you-go On-Demand pricing: EC2 P5.48xlarge (8x H100) ~$34.61/hr, ~$4.33/H100-hr (US East); G6.xlarge ~$0.80/hr (us-east-1); S3 Standard $0.023/GB-mo first 50TB; Savings Plans up to 45% off (e.g., P5 3yr), Reserved Instances, Capacity Blocks.

Moat

AWS's key competitive moat is its massive scale advantage as the cloud market pioneer, delivering unmatched operational efficiency, global infrastructure across 21+ regions with 200+ services, and pricing power from high volume that forces competitors to overinvest just to match. High switching costs from enterprise-grade maturity, deepest governance capabilities, and proprietary AI technologies like Trainium/Inferentia chips further lock in customers, reinforced by 30-38% market share leadership.

Active layers