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 | Vertiv | NVIDIA | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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. | narrow The FY2025 10-K splits its competition into niche players (Delta, Stulz, Johnson Controls, Socomec) and large-scale globals (Schneider, Eaton, Legrand, Huawei) — real differentiation inside a field that contains several larger diversified rivals. | wide Wide: the CUDA software platform and its developer installed base create high switching costs across the AI-training stack, defended by $76.7B cumulative R&D and reinforced by ~71% FY2026 gross margins and Data Center revenue (~90% of total) up 68% YoY — durable, hard-to-replicate advantages per the FY2026 10-K. |
| 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. | switching costs The filing pairs installed critical infrastructure with a lifecycle service estate — preventative maintenance, project management, acceptance testing, remote monitoring, spares — across more than 40 countries; ripping out the vendor means ripping out the service relationship too. | intangibles ip The durable edge rests on proprietary IP and software: the full-stack CUDA development platform running on all NVIDIA GPUs plus hundreds of proprietary domain libraries/SDKs/APIs, and $76.7B cumulative R&D yielding "inventions that are essential to modern computing" (NVIDIA invented the GPU in 1999). This is reinforced by developer-ecosystem network effects and CUDA switching costs, per the FY2026 10-K Business section. |
| 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). | co leader Named against Schneider Electric and Eaton among global competitors; the filing claims differentiation through application expertise and the most comprehensive portfolio — attributed, not independently measured. | clear leader FY2026 Data Center revenue was $193.7B (~90% of the $215.9B total), up 68% YoY on the Blackwell ramp, and NVIDIA describes itself as "a data center scale AI infrastructure company reshaping all industries." The 10-K frames named rivals as parties who "provide or intend to provide" GPUs/accelerators — incumbent-leader positioning. |
| 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. | moderate The filing lists price as one of five competitive bases but leads with reliability and quality, and sells into customers 'in some of the world's most critical industries' — where downtime, not price, is the binding constraint. | strong FY2026 gross margin was 71.1% (75.0% in FY2025); per the 10-K MD&A the ~3.9pt decline reflects the Hopper HGX→Blackwell full-system mix shift and a one-time $4.5B H20 excess-inventory/purchase-obligation charge, not competitive price erosion. A low-70s% hardware gross margin evidences strong pricing power. |
| 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. | Vertiv sells the power and cooling that AI compute physically cannot run without, and its filing leads with 'first-to-market designs engineered for next-gen rack-scale artificial intelligence compute.' Its customers are 'the world's most critical industries' — hyperscale, colocation, neocloud and enterprise data centers — where competition, by the filing's own account, runs on reliability, quality, price, service and customer relationships. The differentiation claims are the company's own; the breadth of the named competitor set is the check on them. | NVIDIA pairs market-leading accelerated-computing hardware (the Blackwell data-center platform) with a proprietary full-stack software moat — CUDA plus hundreds of domain libraries — funded by $76.7B of cumulative R&D, and its "large and growing number of developers and installed base... strengthens our ecosystem and increases the value of our platform for our customers" (FY2026 10-K). Competition is intensifying from AMD, Intel and Huawei, and from hyperscalers (Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft) designing internal AI silicon, but rivals must overcome NVIDIA's entrenched CUDA software ecosystem to displace it. |
| Chain position | Developer and landlord of power-advantaged, liquid-cooled AI data-center capacity, leased long-term to CoreWeave and investment-grade hyperscalers. | Layer-7 power and cooling under every AI rack. | Upstream compute-platform supplier: NVIDIA sells full-stack data-center systems (GPU + Arm CPU + DPU + NVLink/InfiniBand networking + CUDA software) to cloud providers and enterprises, and relies on third-party foundry/assembly-test-packaging partners (e.g., SPIL, Amkor, Wistron, Fabrinet). Per the FY2026 10-K, several of its largest customers (hyperscalers such as Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft) are simultaneously customers and emerging competitors developing internal accelerated-computing silicon. |
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| Long-horizon vote | -0.20 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.42 at weight 0.20 · swarm bullish Editorial prior, not backtested. |