Amazon Bets Logistics Is the New Cloud

Amazon is turning another internal capability into a commercial product. This time, the asset is logistics.

On Monday (May 4), the eCommerce and retail titan launched Amazon Supply Chain Services (ASCS). The platform solution opens the company’s freight, distribution, fulfillment and parcel shipping tools to businesses of all sizes.

Amazon’s retail business is the public face, but logistics is the foundation. The company built warehouses, trucks, cargo planes, robots, and delivery networks not just to support e-commerce — controlling how goods move has always been core to its business model.

ASCS follows the same playbook as Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS started as an internal tool to manage Amazon’s own computing infrastructure, then became a business in its own right. Once Amazon realized other companies faced the same technical burdens, it commercialized that capability. Businesses stopped building their own servers and began renting computing power instead. AWS became not just a profitable division but a foundational layer of the digital economy.

Amazon is now making the same bet on logistics.

In a market where companies are outsourcing logistics, Amazon’s real advantage may not be its trucks or warehouses. It may be the data they generate: unmatched visibility into movement, fulfillment, and inventory.

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Why Amazon’s Real Logistics Advantage Is Data

The AWS and ASCS comparison is not a perfect one. Computing workloads virtualize more easily than physical goods movement. Warehouses cannot scale infinitely with software abstractions alone. Yet Amazon’s advantage across logistics also lies in the same principle that powered AWS: utilization.

Many companies underutilize logistics assets. Trucks travel partially empty, warehouses carry inefficient inventory allocations and distribution centers can experience fluctuating throughput. Amazon’s scale allows it to aggregate demand across thousands of businesses, helping smooth inefficiencies through network density.

Amazon’s vertically integrated ecosystem allows the company to observe and coordinate across inventory, demand, and forecast layers simultaneously. The flywheel increasingly resembles an artificial intelligence training loop embedded inside global commerce.

AWS didn’t win because Amazon owned servers.AWS didn’t win because Amazon owned servers. It won because Amazon understood how workloads move through distributed systems at scale. Similarly, Amazon’s logistics advantage increasingly stems from visibility into how goods move through the economy.

As PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster noted previously in her series of thought leadership pieces, “What 2026 Will Make Obvious,” Jeff Bezos built Amazon around a simple principle: “your margin is my opportunity” Use technology and scale to undercut incumbents, then pass the savings to customers through lower prices and better experiences. AWS was never merely about server capacity. It became dominant because Amazon understood infrastructure as a software and optimization problem rather than a hardware business alone.

See also: Online Finally Breaks Brick and Mortar

What Amazon’s Supply Chain Platform Means for Logistics Incumbents

Amazon’s platform play across logistics is also likely to further change customer expectations. Businesses may expect real-time visibility, predictive inventory, fast fulfillment, and integrated analytics as standard features. Not premium ones.

Amazon helped create those expectations through Prime and marketplace operations. Now it is exporting them into the broader logistics sector. AWS transformed Amazon from an online store into a core infrastructure provider for the digital economy. Logistics may represent the company’s attempt to build equivalent infrastructure for the physical economy.

The real risk for incumbents is not just losing volume. It is being commoditized by platforms that control orchestration.

Webster tracked this shift in a January piece, examining how retail’s core functions moved online and reorganized at scale.

“In 1990, department stores accounted for about 14.5% of U.S. retail sales. By 2024, their share had fallen to 0.5%. Dollar sales peaked in 2001 and declined steadily from there.

“That decline mattered because department stores were not just another retail format. They were the organizing infrastructure of physical retail. They aggregated demand, curated selection and subsidized the economics of the mall. Specialty retailers depended on their foot traffic. When the anchors weakened, the ecosystem built around them became unstable …. The department store did not fail because consumers stopped shopping. It failed because the function it performed moved elsewhere. That same shift now defines retail as a whole,” Webster wrote.