Amazon unveiled the financial performance of its powerful growth engine for the first time on Thursday, and the numbers sure looked pretty — especially compared with big companies like Microsoft and Google that are chasing it.

While Amazon is primarily known as an online retailer, its revenue and its stock market returns for years have been energized by an entirely different kind of commerce: renting processing power to start-ups and, increasingly, established businesses.

Amazon helped popularize the field — known as cloud computing — and largely had it to itself for years, an enormous advantage in an industry where rivals usually watch one another closely.

But the other tech powerhouses have since awoken to the fact that they were nowhere in a market that could soon be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Microsoft, Amazon’s crosstown rival, is especially committed to the challenge, and is in furious pursuit.