On Friday, Amazon celebrates its 30th anniversary as a two trillion dollar company, crowning a remarkable rise from an online bookseller that founded the company in a garage in the early days of the Internet.

Founder Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO in 2021, but remains chairman and largest shareholder of a company now known as an e-commerce and cloud computing giant.

Since its founding as a bookseller, the company has evolved into a heavyweight in online retail where consumers can buy almost anything.

In addition, the company has expanded its business to manufacture many of its products itself and sell them online. This includes electronics, most notably a popular range of tablets and smart home hubs and speakers.

The Seattle-based company has now established itself as a leading technology company through the virtual assistant Alexa behind its smart home products, but also through Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud computing arm, which has data centers around the world and provides server space to many of the world’s other largest companies.

When Amazon became one of the few companies to cross the $2 trillion valuation mark last month—only Nvidia, Apple and Microsoft were better off—part of the recent rise in its share price was due to rising demand for cloud computing as a result of the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) services.

AI services are energy and compute intensive, meaning many companies need to increase their cloud computing capacity to run these in-demand new tools.

Mr Bezos has now confirmed that he plans to sell nearly $5 billion worth of Amazon shares, following a similar announcement in February in which he said he would sell $8.5 billion worth of stock – the first time he has divested himself of Amazon shares since 2021.

Going forward, Amazon’s dominance in online retail is likely to face increasing competition from a range of alternatives and rivals, including emerging e-commerce companies in Asia and the growing popularity of secondhand marketplaces as consumers seek to save money and protect the environment by recycling old goods.

The company also faces intense competition in the AI ​​products market from other technology giants and emerging AI companies.

The rise of generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has set the standard for a new generation of virtual assistants that are both text- and voice-based and can find and generate images and videos.

Currently, Amazon’s Alexa is primarily a voice-based assistant, a conversational assistant – a concept that many believe the company needs to expand if it wants to compete with ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot.