That doesn't make sense. AWS allows Amazon (the retail store) to go very deep into the red and the entire company could still be afloat. There's no reason to distance yourself from the most profitable part of your company.

I also don't see why Amazon wouldn't want to be a tech conglomerate. They'are already deep down that path and it seems to be working for them.

Don't forget that AWS came out of Amazon's need for infrastructure. Amazon is dogfooding with AWS, and that's one of the reasons AWS remains in the lead when it comes to cloud compute platforms. They keep launching new, useful services, that come out of real business use cases.

Former Amazon person here.

This is totally wrong. Amazon retail has been running on AWS for years.

I'm curious, does it run on AWS in the sense that when I launch an instance I might be collocated on the same physical machine as an instance doing work for amazon.com or do they have a separate deployment of the AWS stack in a dedicated part of the datacenter?

Maybe he confused it with Amazon retail rather recently switching from Akamai to CloudFront for static assets.

Why would they? Amazon is a platform company.

Maybe they should split the retail business from Amazon instead.

I'm waiting for Amazon Prime to start bundling server time.

That would only make sense for a very small portion of their users, and confuse a great many.

I think the more likely path is going to be services like their photo library, which can clearly make use of AWS, but doesn't directly expose it to customers. I could see some sort of backup service happening in the near future, and someone else mentioned Echo.

That's never stopped them before.

Why _don't_ they do this?

It is propping up the rest of their business (which is doing very well but like others have said has very low or negligible margins).

If anything, they could leverage their cloud tech further in the consumer space by developing uses for it beyond just video streaming (could be other uses but this is the main one I am aware of). I think we've seen that with Echo and a next-gen version could easily do more as an assistant, an all encompassing one for any digital support needs. Perhaps also stream games a la PS Now.

That kind of spinoff only happens when activist investors demand it. I think Jeff Bezos and his true believers still hold a significant portion of the stock.

a guess: it's not particularly profitable as a stand-alone business. Amazon is burying all aws' capex in their general capex.