Twenty years after pioneering the cloud, Amazon Web Services chases the next big prize: AI

As soon as online photo storage startup SmugMug Inc. heard about Amazon.com Inc.’s Simple Storage Service, an online data storage repository that debuted on March 14, 2006, “my eyes got all big,” co-founder and Chief Executive Don MacAskill said at the time. Amazon’s S3, the pioneering service for what soon became known as cloud computing,