Amazon NASDAQ:AMZN turned 32 on Sunday, marking more than 3 decades of evolution from an online bookseller into a retail, cloud and AI powerhouse.

Jeff Bezos founded the company on July 5, 1994, in Bellevue, Washington, initially incorporating it as Cadabra before switching to Amazon.com. The website opened publicly on July 16, 1995, selling only books before expanding into music, videos, consumer goods and eventually the third-party marketplace and Amazon Web Services.

The scale of that transformation is striking. JPMorgan estimates Amazon passed Walmart NASDAQ:WMT last year to become the largest U.S. retailer. AWS generated about $129 billion in 2025 revenue and is running at an annualized pace above $140 billion in 2026, more than Salesforce NYSE:CRM, Adobe NASDAQ:ADBE and ServiceNow NYSE:NOW generated last year combined.