Compare moats
Up to three covered companies, band by band. Every call is a curated editorial judgment, never a disclosed figure — and every band carries its cited basis.
| AMD | Cipher Mining | RELX plc | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | narrow AMD's FY2025 10-K documents real but bounded advantages: approximately 7,200 U.S. patents and roughly 18,900 patent matters worldwide, an outright claim that 'We are the market share leader in semi-custom game console products,' and gross margin of 50% on revenue up 34% to $34.6 billion. The same filing sets the ceiling: 'Some of our competitors may possess stronger market positions, larger customer bases, more design wins, and greater financial, sales, marketing, and distribution resources than us'; Nvidia is named 'the discrete GPU market share leader'; and AMD relies on TSMC 'for the production of all wafers for microprocessor and GPU products at 7 nanometer (nm) or smaller nodes.' Advantages that are genuine, contested, and dependent on a shared foundry are narrow, not wide. | none Cipher (renamed Cipher Digital Inc. on 20 February 2026) holds signed, credit-supported leases but has not yet shown that they amount to a durable advantage. Its 2025 Form 10-K (filed 2026-02-24) says "Through the end of 2025, our revenue has been derived from mining bitcoin". Its Q2 2026 business update (2026-08-04, Exhibit 99.1, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1819989/000181998926000038/q226_earningsxprxdraftxvf.htm) reported "Q2 2026 Revenue of $25 million", and its first HPC rent began only in August 2026 at Black Pearl. The 10-K's own risk factors describe a contested market. They say "There has been an increasing number of businesses constructing HPC data centers, which has resulted in increasing competition and pricing pressure that may cause us to reduce our pricing in order to remain competitive", that "our data centers are single-tenant properties", and that lessees "will have the right to terminate the lease if there are significant delays in the completion of construction". At Barber Lake, where the 10-K targeted Phase I delivery "by September 30, 2026", a September 2026 amendment, made "In connection with change orders and the continued evolution of tenant requirements", moved data-hall deliveries to the fourth quarter of 2026 through the first quarter of 2027. Under it, Cipher "will bear the first $359.3 million of costs in excess of the initial budgeted amount" (2026-09-25). There is real counter-evidence: a 15-year Amazon lease, a Google-backstopped Fluidstack lease whose contracted life a "leading AI lab" extended to 20 years, and a third lease with an investment-grade hyperscale tenant. Until that capacity is delivered and paying rent, though, a moat is not shown, so the band is none. | wide Independent sources support entrenched positions in RELX's two content businesses. In legal research, a Stanford-led study of legal AI tools (arXiv 2405.20362v1, 2024-05-30, https://arxiv.org/html/2405.20362v1) says Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis "have historically enjoyed a virtual duopoly over the legal research market" (citing a 2006 article for that point) and "continue to be two of the largest incumbents now selling legal AI products". In scientific publishing, Larivière, Haustein and Mongeon in PLOS ONE (2015-06-10, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502) found Reed-Elsevier published 24.1% of natural and medical sciences papers in 2013, the largest share, and that its Scientific, Technical & Medical division's profit margin "steadily increased from 30.6% to 38.9% between 2006 and 2013." RELX's 2025 Annual Report (published 2026-02-19) shows the economics continuing: revenue of £9,590m, adjusted operating profit of £3,342m and an adjusted operating margin of 34.8% against 33.9% in 2024, with 54% of revenue from subscriptions. The limits are in the same report. Its principal risks say "We operate in highly competitive and dynamic markets" that change with "technological innovations, such as the use of artificial intelligence" and "the entrance of new competitors". Exhibitions holds "a global market share of less than 10%" in "a fragmented industry", and the Chair noted "share price volatility across a number of sectors, including software and data services." Long-held positions in legal research and scientific publishing, with margins that have kept rising, support a wide rating. The main threat is AI-native competition, which has not yet slowed reported growth. |
| Moat type | intangibles ip The FY2025 10-K locates the durable asset in design IP rather than manufacturing: 'We rely on contracts and intellectual property rights to protect our products and technologies from unauthorized third-party copying and use,' with approximately 7,200 U.S. patents and about 18,900 patent matters worldwide spanning x86 EPYC/Ryzen CPUs, CDNA/RDNA graphics and the Versal/Zynq adaptive-SoC families, and it credits customer wins to 'our broad IP portfolio and leadership in design, integration and advanced packaging.' It is explicitly not cost_scale: AMD is fabless and 'utilize[s] Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC) for the production of wafers' — the same leading-edge foundry its merchant competitors use, so no manufacturing-scale advantage accrues to it. | none No moat source is demonstrated yet. Switching costs are the most likely candidate, since the leases are long (15 years at Black Pearl; Barber Lake now a 20-year contracted life) and each site has a single tenant. But the 10-K says tenant guarantees "will only be effective after rent commencement under such leases and are subject to certain limitations", and by August 2026 rent had begun at only one site. The advantages the 10-K claims are the company's own. It speaks of "industry-leading expertise in originating and securing industrial-scale, greenfield data center sites" and of securing West Texas land "on more favorable terms than in more established data center markets". The same document says "there is significant competition for power capacity and energized facilities". Intellectual property is modest: "four granted United States patents and one issued patent in Taiwan". With 66 full-time employees, Cipher has no scale advantage over the competitors it names: CoreWeave, Digital Realty, Equinix, Vantage Data Centers and Aligned Data Centers. | intangibles ip RELX says its advantage is proprietary content and data. The 2025 Annual Report says it builds products by combining "our unique content and comprehensive data sets with advanced technologies", describes Lexis+ AI as "built and trained on one of the world's largest repositories of accurate and exclusive legal content", and cites more than 3,000 Elsevier journals including the Cell Press and The Lancet families. On the H1 2026 results call (2026-07-23, https://www.relx.com/~/media/Files/R/RELX-Group/documents/investors/transcripts/first-half-results-2026-transcript.pdf) the CEO said Risk grows by "leveraging our unique contributory and proprietary datasets, with over 90% of revenue coming from machine-to-machine interactions." Independent support comes from PLOS ONE (2015), which says libraries face a publisher oligopoly in which "each product represents a unique value and cannot be replaced". According to the annual report, in June 2025 LexisNexis agreed a strategic alliance with Harvey, an AI platform for legal and professional services, under which LexisNexis "will integrate its Lexis+ AI capabilities (powered by LexisNexis content) within the Harvey platform". Switching costs add to this: legal products are sold "on a paid subscription basis, with subscriptions often under multi-year contracts." |
| Leadership | fast follower The FY2025 10-K itself places AMD behind the pace-setter in its two most important markets: 'Our principal competitor in the supply of discrete graphics is Nvidia, who is the discrete GPU market share leader,' and the risk factors state Nvidia 'leverages its market position in data center GPU, financial resources, and proprietary software ecosystem to promote its systems and influences customers who do business with us.' AMD is nonetheless executing 'an annual cadence of leadership for AMD Instinct solutions' and has won gigawatt-scale commitments (OpenAI, 6 GW) — following fast and closely, not setting the pace. | fast follower No independent share or rank was found. The 10-K names CoreWeave, Digital Realty, Equinix, Vantage Data Centers and Aligned Data Centers as competitors, along with miners that have "signed leases with hyperscalers and HPC tenants": Hut 8, IREN, TeraWulf, Core Scientific and Applied Digital. Cipher has signed hyperscale-grade tenants (Amazon; Fluidstack with a Google backstop; a third investment-grade hyperscaler) but delivered its first HPC capacity only in August 2026 (Q2 2026 update). That makes it a fast follower. Its self-description as "a leading developer, owner, and operator of industrial-scale data centers" is the company's own claim and is not counted. | co leader RELX's own 2025 Annual Report ranks its businesses as Risk "Key verticals #1", STM "Global #1", Legal "US #2" and "Outside US #1 or #2", and Exhibitions "Global #2". Independent sources, both dated, support two of these. PLOS ONE (2015) puts Reed-Elsevier first in natural and medical sciences publishing with 24.1% of 2013 papers, ahead of Springer (11.9%) and Wiley-Blackwell (11.3%). The Stanford study (2024-05-30) describes legal research as a historical duopoly of Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis, and found that "Lexis+ AI is the highest-performing system we test, answering 65% of our queries accurately." The publishing data is from 2013, Legal is second in the U.S. by RELX's own account, and the Risk and Exhibitions ranks are the company's own claims. That supports co-leader, not clear leader. |
| Pricing power | moderate FY2025 gross margin was 50%, up from 49% in 2024 per the 10-K — healthy and improving — but the same filing attributes average-selling-price pressure to competitors: Intel 'uses its microprocessor market position to price its products aggressively and target our customers and channel partners with special incentives. These aggressive activities have reduced and may reduce our unit sales and average selling prices for many of our products'. Pricing power is real but contested. | weak The 10-K says competition "has resulted in increasing competition and pricing pressure that may cause us to reduce our pricing in order to remain competitive". It adds that if customers cut usage "we may be compelled to lower our prices or risk losing a significant customer". At Barber Lake, Cipher agreed to absorb "the first $359.3 million of costs in excess of the initial budgeted amount", with the tenant reimbursing "50% of any such costs above that amount" (2026-09-25, Exhibit 99.1, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1819989/000181998926000043/barberlakeleaseamendmentpr.htm). Its one input-cost edge is specific to mining: Odessa's power costs about 2.8 c/kWh under the Luminant contract, available "until at least July 2027". A landlord that concedes cost overruns to its tenants has weak pricing power. | moderate The 2025 Annual Report says RELX products "often account for less than 1% of our customers' total cost base but can have a significant and positive impact on the economics of the remaining 99%", and reports a group adjusted operating margin of 34.8% in 2025 against 33.9% in 2024. On the H1 2026 call the CFO reported a margin of 35.5%. He attributed the gains to cost discipline: "we focus on ensuring that cost growth remains below revenue growth in all of our businesses." The CEO said that "roughly 3/4 of the renewal value is coming from the Lexis+ with Protégé package", which means renewals are moving customers onto the higher-value AI platform. Independent evidence on Elsevier is older. PLOS ONE (2015) says libraries "have to manage with less as prices increase" and that, because of the oligopoly, they are "more or less helpless". It also found the STM division's profit margin never fell below 30% over the 1991-2013 period it studied. RELX does not disclose list-price increases. Most of the evidence is margin-based. The margins are high and rising, but management credits the gains to keeping cost growth below revenue growth, and the only independent evidence of price increases is from 2015. That supports moderate, not strong, pricing power. |
| Summary | AMD's edge is architectural design IP executed on someone else's fabs. The FY2025 10-K describes a full-stack portfolio — EPYC server CPUs, Instinct AI accelerators, Ryzen client parts where 'AMD was the first company to integrate a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) on the same SoC as an x86 CPU for AI PCs,' Radeon graphics, Pensando networking and Versal adaptive SoCs — backed by roughly 18,900 patent matters worldwide, and it discloses gigawatt-scale customer commitments (an October 2025 agreement with OpenAI 'to deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs,' first gigawatt on Instinct MI450). The same filing bounds that moat: Nvidia is 'the discrete GPU market share leader' and 'leverages its market position in data center GPU, financial resources, and proprietary software ecosystem'; Intel 'uses its microprocessor market position to price its products aggressively'; Arm architectures and customers who 'internally develop products to support similar AI workloads' are named as encroaching; and every wafer at 7 nm or below comes from TSMC. Revenue grew 34% in FY2025 with Data Center up 32%, but the filing's own competitive framing places AMD in the challenger seat rather than the entrenched one. | Cipher built bitcoin mining data centres in Texas and is now developing single-tenant AI and HPC campuses for lease to hyperscalers. Its 10-K reports a portfolio of "4.2 gigawatts ("GW") of capacity across 10 sites". It lists a 15-year Amazon Web Services lease for about 300 MW of turnkey capacity at Black Pearl and a Fluidstack lease at Barber Lake (300 MW gross) under which Google "has agreed to backstop certain obligations of Fluidstack". It describes bitcoin mining at Odessa on a Luminant power contract at about 2.8 c/kWh. In 2026 it signed a third campus lease "with an investment-grade Hyperscale tenant" (Q1 2026 update, 2026-05-05), delivered first Black Pearl capacity in August "two months ahead of the original schedule" with rent commenced, and fully funded its Stingray development with a bond (Q2 2026 update). On 2026-09-25 it said Barber Lake's contracted life was extended from 10 to 20 years, taking contracted revenue at the site "from $3.8 billion to over $9 billion". The 10-K says Odessa was "the first bitcoin mining data center awarded the Management and Operations, or M&O, Stamp of Approval award from the Uptime Institute", which is independent recognition of how the company operates. Against this, the latest quarter's revenue was still bitcoin mining and fell to $25 million. The 10-K describes growing "competition and pricing pressure", single-tenant concentration, and termination rights for construction delays. The Barber Lake schedule was reset, and Cipher absorbs the first $359.3 million of cost overruns. Cipher's contracted pipeline is substantial, but a competitive advantage is not yet demonstrated, so it is rated as having no moat. That could change to narrow once its leased campuses are delivered and paying rent. | RELX sells information-based analytics and decision tools in four business areas. In 2025, per its Annual Report, Risk (LexisNexis Risk Solutions) had revenue of £3,485m and adjusted operating profit of £1,305m; Scientific, Technical & Medical (Elsevier) £2,714m and £1,035m; Legal (LexisNexis Legal & Professional) £1,806m and £415m; and Exhibitions (RX) £1,186m and £410m. The moat rests on content and data that are hard to replicate. A Stanford study describes a historical Westlaw-LexisNexis "virtual duopoly" in legal research. A PLOS ONE study found Reed-Elsevier the largest publisher of natural and medical sciences papers in 2013, and RELX reports that Elsevier articles accounted for "over 18% of global research output and 29% of citations" in its latest comparison. Risk is built on contributory databases such as the C.L.U.E. claims history database, which "collects and reports up to seven years of US personal automobile, property claims and small business information". The products are cheap relative to what customers spend: RELX says they "often account for less than 1% of our customers' total cost base". Group adjusted operating margin rose to 34.8% in 2025 and to 35.5% in the first half of 2026. AI is the main test of the moat. RELX is turning it into upsell: about 90% of Legal new-sales value now comes from the AI-enabled Lexis+ with Protégé platform, and Legal underlying revenue growth reached 10% in H1 2026. On the same call, an analyst cited AI-native legal players Harvey and Legora with combined annual recurring revenue above $400 million, and the CEO said RELX is "not going to be the leader" in the much larger legal workflow software market. RELX names the shift to open access as a principal risk for Elsevier. On the 2026 call, an analyst raised a U.S. OMB proposal to make journal subscription costs and article processing charges unallowable expenses on federal research awards. |
| Chain position | A fabless merchant-silicon designer sitting one layer above the foundries: the FY2025 10-K states AMD relies on TSMC 'for the production of all wafers for microprocessor and GPU products at 7 nanometer (nm) or smaller nodes' and primarily on GLOBALFOUNDRIES above 7 nm, with packaging and test performed by Asia-Pacific ATMP partners — so its cost, supply and cadence are inherited from partners it does not control. | Cipher develops single-tenant, powered data-centre campuses for hyperscale and AI tenants: Amazon at Black Pearl, Fluidstack (backstopped by Google) at Barber Lake, and an unnamed investment-grade hyperscaler at a third campus. Meanwhile it winds down bitcoin mining. | An AI-application-layer user of frontier models: on the H1 2026 call the CEO said RELX takes AI tools "from the sort of frontier lab companies" and runs them inside its own products on verified content. The 2025 Annual Report says LexisNexis will integrate Lexis+ AI capabilities, powered by LexisNexis content, within the Harvey platform. |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.06 at weight 0.20 · swarm bullish Editorial prior, not backtested. | -0.06 at weight 0.20 · swarm bearish Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.30 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |