Coupang Follows Amazon into Cloud, Beyond Retail

[Korea Financial Times, Park seulgi] Coupang is accelerating its transformation into the “Amazon of Korea,” now venturing beyond retail into the cloud business—a key pillar of Amazon’s profitability model. The move signals Coupang’s strategic intent to diversify income sources in the face of growing competition and the limitations of retail margins.

According to industry sources on July 13, Coupang has rebranded its existing AI infrastructure service, previously known as “AI Cloud Computing Service (GPUaaS),” to a new name: Coupang Intelligent Cloud (CIC).

The CIC platform is equipped with high-performance GPUs optimized for complex AI computing. It offers turnkey or custom-clustered GPU infrastructure tailored to the specific computational needs of clients. Coupang also plans to consistently update its hardware with the latest GPU models to keep up with increasingly short hardware replacement cycles. The company’s data centers for CIC are currently located in Seoul and the surrounding metropolitan area.

Previously, Coupang had provided its AI infrastructure primarily to internal teams, research institutes, and select startups. Now, the company is shifting to target a broader base of external clients that require large-scale GPU computing for AI development and operations.

Industry analysts note that Coupang’s latest strategy closely mirrors Amazon’s approach. Amazon began as a retail company, but by building and refining its internal IT infrastructure—such as servers, storage, and networks—to solve its own operational issues, it laid the groundwork for launching Amazon Web Services (AWS). Today, AWS is Amazon’s most profitable division.

In fact, AWS accounted for 16.9% of Amazon’s total revenue and 58% of its operating profit last year. The operating margin of AWS remains high at around 40%, offering a stark contrast to the low-margin nature of traditional retail businesses.

Likewise, Coupang appears to be recognizing the limitations of relying solely on its domestic retail business. The company is facing intensifying competition from Chinese e-commerce platforms such as AliExpress and Temu, which offer aggressive pricing, while also contending with an emerging anti-Coupang alliance among local e-commerce players.

Coupang’s resemblance to Amazon goes beyond just the cloud. It has long followed Amazon’s blueprint: operating its own fulfillment centers based on a direct purchasing model, offering paid membership programs, focusing on rapid delivery, and putting customer experience at the center of its strategy.

Even its willingness to endure long-term losses for the sake of scaling mirrors Amazon’s history. Amazon remained unprofitable for seven years after its founding, while Coupang reported losses for 12 consecutive years since its establishment.

Having embraced Amazon’s playbook, Coupang now appears poised to enter the cloud market more aggressively. Last month, the company participated in a project organized by the Ministry of Science and ICT aimed at expanding national AI computing resources. Coupang also announced plans to collaborate extensively on future government-led AI ecosystem initiatives.

A Coupang Intelligent Cloud official stated, “Leveraging state-of-the-art GPU servers and our large-scale, stable data centers, we aim to deliver top-tier AI cloud computing services,” adding, “We will actively partner with startups and research institutions to help grow Korea’s AI ecosystem.”

Park seulgi (seulgi@fntimes.com)