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.
| Applied Digital | Cipher Mining | Datadog | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | none The FY2026 10-K (filed 2026-07-29) shows contracted revenue, not a demonstrated competitive edge. About 1,410 MW is leased under 15-year take-or-pay, non-cancellable base terms worth about $36.2 billion, but only about 100 MW of the roughly 1.5 GW that is contracted and either operating or under construction was operating and earning revenue at May 31, 2026, and Item 1A says "lessees may have the right to terminate applicable leases if there are significant delays in construction." Item 1A also concedes "We do not have the resources to compete with larger providers of similar products or services at this time," and the Competition section names 13 power-advantaged developers the company competes with. Signed leases give revenue visibility, but the filing does not show a durable advantage. | 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. | narrow The FY2025 10-K grounds real stickiness — a trailing-12-month dollar-based net retention rate of "about 120%" as of December 31, 2025 and "approximately 84% of our customers were using two or more products" out of approximately 32,700 customers — but the same filing caps it. It names IBM, Microsoft and SolarWinds (on-premise infrastructure monitoring), Cisco, New Relic and Dynatrace (APM), Cisco and Elastic (log management) and "native solutions from cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, or AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform" as competitors, plus "home-grown and open-source technologies", and concedes "many of our competitors have greater financial, technical and other resources, greater brand recognition, larger sales forces and marketing budgets". It further discloses an AI-native cohort "which cohort includes our largest customer and represented approximately seven percentage points of our year-over-year revenue growth for the quarter ended December 31, 2025" whose members "have rapidly increased their usage of our product and then optimized or may in the future optimize their usage". Sticky but bounded: narrow, not wide. |
| Moat type | none The 10-K claims three advantages: power-advantaged sites (it believes securing power and interconnection ahead of demand is 'the principal constraint on new HPC capacity and a core differentiator for us from many of our competitors'), a standardized 'franchise-style' design, and hyperscaler master service and master telecom service agreements 'that are difficult to obtain.' The filing does not show any of them to be durable. Its Competition section says competition 'centers on securing and developing sites with access to large-scale, reliable, and cost-competitive power and interconnection' and names 13 power-advantaged developers going after the same leases, and Item 1A concedes it lacks the resources to compete with larger providers. Signed leases are take-or-pay and non-cancellable, so a tenant leaving for convenience owes 'the full remaining contractual value,' but that is contractual lock-in on each lease rather than a moat source, so no moat type is assigned. | 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. | switching costs The 10-K locates the durable hold in platform integration rather than protected IP. A single agent collects "metrics, traces, logs, and other data"; under "One Data Model" every ingested datum is "consistently tagged with metadata regardless of its type", so different data types can be "queried together, correlated, alerted on, and visualized in a common user interface"; more than 1,000 out-of-the-box integrations bind it to the customer's stack; and the attach ladder deepens (approximately 84% of customers on two or more products, 55% on four or more, 33% on six or more and 18% on eight or more as of December 31, 2025). Displacing Datadog means re-instrumenting an estate the filing describes as "frequently deployed across a customer's entire infrastructure, making it ubiquitous". |
| Leadership | behind The 10-K makes no leadership claim and gives no ranking or share figure. Item 1A concedes "We do not have the resources to compete with larger providers of similar products or services at this time" and that some rivals have "substantially greater liquidity and financial resources than we do." Its Competition section places APLD against established operators (Digital Realty, Equinix), hyperscalers that build their own capacity, independent developers and 13 named power-advantaged developers (IREN, Cipher Digital, TeraWulf, Hut 8, Riot, CleanSpark, HIVE, Core Scientific, Bitdeer, Galaxy Digital, Fermi, Keel Infrastructure, MARA). | 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 The 10-K claims only that "We believe that we compete favorably with respect to the factors listed above" — never category leadership — and names a distinct credible rival set in each category it serves, while conceding many of those rivals have greater resources and brand recognition. It does claim one first: being "the first to combine the 'three pillars of observability' - metrics, traces, and logs - into a single end-to-end platform" with log management in 2018. That reads as the leading independent among several credible rivals, not a clear leader. |
| Pricing power | weak Item 1A says "Due to the limited number of hyperscalers, we expect that a limited number of customers will continue to account for a high percentage of our revenue for the foreseeable future," and that if customers' equipment usage declines or they discontinue use of its facilities, APLD "may be compelled to lower our lease prices in some instances or risk losing a significant customer." One customer was 59% of FY2026 revenue from continuing operations. Take-or-pay, non-cancellable terms protect contracted revenue over the base term, and Note 19 reports a $39.1M HPC Hosting segment profit on $385.3M of segment revenue in FY2026, but those terms are agreed with a small group of concentrated buyers. | 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 Expansion is real but volume-driven rather than price-driven. The 10-K attributes the increase in trailing-12-month dollar-based net retention to about 120% (from "high-110%'s" a year earlier) to "increased usage growth from existing customers", and describes self-service expansion by "adding hosts or volumes of data monitored". The same filing warns that if customers "reduce their usage, fail to renew their subscriptions or renew on different terms", then "our revenue and dollar-based net retention may decline" — a usage-metered model hands the customer a dial that seat-based pricing does not. |
| Summary | Applied Digital designs, builds and operates purpose-built, liquid-cooled HPC data centers, which it calls 'AI factories', and leases the capacity to CoreWeave and investment-grade hyperscalers. At May 31, 2026 its 10-K lists five campuses (Polaris Forge 1-3 and Delta Forge 1-2) with about 1,410 MW contracted under roughly 15-year take-or-pay, non-cancellable leases worth about $36.2 billion over the base terms. The filing claims three sources of advantage: it controls power-advantaged sites, it uses a standardized 'franchise-style' design built to deliver about 150 MW in about 14 to 18 months, and it holds hyperscaler master agreements that are 'difficult to obtain.' The same document shows how early the company is. About 100 MW was operating and earning revenue. One customer was 59% of FY2026 revenue from continuing operations. It competes with Digital Realty, Equinix, hyperscalers that build their own capacity and 13 named power-advantaged developers, and it concedes that it lacks the resources to compete with larger providers. Signed leases give long-dated revenue visibility, but the filing does not show a durable competitive advantage. | 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. | Datadog's advantage is consolidation, not exclusivity. Per the FY2025 10-K it runs a modular platform of "over 20 products" fed by one agent and one tagged data model, deployed across a customer's whole estate with more than 1,000 integrations — so each additional product adopted makes the estate costlier to unwind, which shows up as roughly 120% dollar-based net retention and a multi-product attach ladder that thickened at every rung during 2025. What holds the rating at narrow rather than wide is that the filing itself names hyperscaler-native monitoring and open-source tooling as direct substitutes in the same categories, and flags an AI-native cohort including its largest customer that can optimize usage down as quickly as it ramped up. |
| Chain position | Developer and landlord of power-advantaged, liquid-cooled AI data-center capacity, leased long-term to CoreWeave and investment-grade hyperscalers. | 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. | A software layer above the cloud rather than a supplier into it: the 10-K describes the platform as "cloud agnostic", deployable across "public cloud, private cloud, on-premise, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments", and monetizes the AI build-out through LLM Observability, which traces LLM chains and correlates them with APM. |
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| Long-horizon vote | -0.20 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | -0.06 at weight 0.20 · swarm bearish Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |