The Cloud
On 13 March 2006 Amazon opened S3 at fifteen cents per gigabyte per month. In August came EC2 — the computer itself, rented by the hour. In 1959 Xerox refused to sell its copier and charged by the page; the cloud is that model completed. Own neither the machine nor the room it sits in, and pay by the second and the gigabyte. Startups could reach the world without the capital to buy a server, and most of this map's recent models — the subscriptions, the flea markets, the streaming, the tipping — run, in fact, on this floor. And the numbers tell you what the business really is. In 2024, AWS was about 18 per cent of Amazon's revenue and about 58 per cent of its operating profit. The business built at the side of the shop out-earns the shop.
The myth, corrected
AWS began by renting out Amazon's spare servers
Werner Vogels, the CTO of AWS itself, has said flatly that «the excess capacity story is a myth» — any spare capacity would have been consumed within two months of launch — and Benjamin Black, one of its first architects, testified that every part of it was purpose-built for AWS from the start. Not a by-product recycled, but a business built on purpose. The more plausible the origin story, the more often the principals deny it — a shape this map keeps meeting.