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.
| Bloom Energy | NetApp | JPMorgan Chase | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | narrow FY2025 10-K (Item 1, filed 2026-02-09): a proprietary solid-oxide platform protected by 380 active U.S. utility patents plus 183 pending, with speed-to-power the company says can deliver onsite power 'within approximately 90 days' — real but contested advantages: the same 10-K's Item 1A calls distributed generation and hydrogen 'still emerging markets' whose acceptance is uncertain, and revenue concentration was 43%/13%/12% across three customers in FY2025 (sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1664703/000162828026006516/be-20251231.htm). | narrow The FY2026 10-K shows a real, durable lock but not an unassailable one. On the durable side: "Our cloud storage services are based on the same ONTAP data management software that underpins our on-premises ONTAP storage infrastructure offerings", and the same filing's income statement shows the company holding a gross margin near 71% across all three reported years - $4,433M on $6,268M in FY2024, $4,613M on $6,572M in FY2025 and $4,899M on $6,925M in FY2026 - while revenue grew from $6,268M to $6,925M and income from operations widened from 19% to 24% of net revenues. Holding that margin through the memory-cost shock the same filing discloses is the commercial evidence the lock is worth something. On the limiting side, the filing says competition "is intense", that in public cloud "customers may choose native cloud services that are consumed as operating expenses", and that "New competitors or alliances among existing competitors could emerge and quickly gain significant market share" - and IDC's 1Q26 external-storage tracker (Blocks & Files, 2026-06-16, cited on the AFF/ASA product row below) ranks NetApp second behind Dell, not first. | wide The 2025 Form 10-K opens with a balance sheet and a licensing perimeter that a new entrant cannot assemble: $4.4 trillion in assets and $362.4 billion in stockholders' equity at December 31, 2025, a principal bank subsidiary (JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A.) with branches in 48 states and Washington, D.C., 318,512 employees across 66 countries, and consolidated supervision as a bank and financial holding company by the Federal Reserve, layered with the OCC, FDIC, SEC, FINRA, CFTC, U.K. PRA/FCA and the ECB over its principal subsidiaries. Item 1 also notes the Bank Holding Company Act restricts holding companies to banking and closely-related activities, so the charter itself is scarce. Rated wide rather than higher because Item 1's own Competition paragraph calls the environments 'highly competitive' and names e-commerce, digital-asset and financial-technology entrants that 'disintermediate traditional banking products'. |
| Moat type | intangibles ip The FY2025 10-K states 'Intellectual property is an essential differentiator for our business' and details 380 active U.S. utility patents, 252 active international patents, trade secrets around cell printing, and a purpose-built copy-exact Newark manufacturing facility — the moat rests on proprietary solid-oxide technology and manufacturing know-how, not network effects or locked-in customers (Item 1, Intellectual Property / Manufacturing Facilities). | switching costs The FY2026 10-K makes the source of the advantage explicit and it is the cost of leaving the data-management layer, not a network or a patent estate. The same ONTAP software runs the on-premises arrays and the cloud services ("Our cloud storage services are based on the same ONTAP data management software that underpins our on-premises ONTAP storage infrastructure offerings"), and the AFF family "allows customers to connect to clouds for more data services, data tiering, caching, and disaster recovery". A customer's volume layout, snapshot and replication workflow and operating tools therefore carry from the array into Azure, AWS and Google rather than being abandoned at the cloud boundary — the filing describes NetApp as "the only provider of enterprise-grade storage services natively embedded in the world's largest public cloud providers", so the usual moment of escape is instead the moment the relationship renews. | cost scale The filing's durable advantage is scale rather than a proprietary technology or a stated network effect: $4.4 trillion of assets and $362.4 billion of equity, 318,512 employees, a 48-state branch footprint and a GSIB capital and liquidity regime administered under the Basel III framework. Item 1A repeatedly frames technology as a required expenditure - 'New technologies have required and could require JPMorganChase to increase expenditures to modify its products' and possible 'significant investments in technology' for quantum-resistant encryption - which is a fixed cost the firm spreads over a base few competitors match. The filing asserts no network effect and no switching-cost lock-in. |
| Leadership | clear leader Scoped to fuel-cell-based onsite power for datacenters: Energy Changemakers (2026-07-04) positions Bloom as the market leader in fuel-cell deployment for AI datacenters — Brookfield framework expanded $5B→$25B, Oracle up to 2.8 GW, Equinix 100+ MW across 19 US datacenters, AEP gigawatt-scale — with FuelCell Energy the named challenger at smaller aggregate scale (~450/380/360 MW deals). In onsite power broadly (vs. turbines and engines) Bloom is one option among several (energychangemakers.com/fuel-cells-gain-ground-in-data-centers/). | co leader IDC's 1Q26 external enterprise storage systems tracker, as reported by Blocks & Files on 2026-06-16 (cited in full on the AFF/ASA product row below), ranks NetApp second worldwide behind Dell and ahead of Everpure, Huawei and HPE, attributing the placing to "its growing all-flash business and cloud-integrated data management". Second of five ranked vendors, in a market whose leader is someone else, is a shared front rank rather than an owned one - and the distinct claim NetApp makes in the FY2026 10-K is positional rather than volumetric: being "the only provider of enterprise-grade storage services natively embedded in the world's largest public cloud providers". | co leader Item 1 claims the firm is 'a leader' in five distinct businesses at once, and 'a leading financial services firm based in the United States' - but it claims to be 'a leader', never the leader, and names no rank or peer comparison anywhere in Item 1 or Item 1A. Scale disclosed in the filing (assets, equity, 318,512 employees, 66 countries, CCB 144,196 / CIB 94,563 / AWM 29,722 headcount) puts it in the front rank; the document itself supports a co-leader reading and not a sole-leader one. |
| Pricing power | moderate Q2 2026 release: GAAP gross margin 33.4%, up 668 bps YoY, with 34.3% non-GAAP and raised FY26 guidance of ~34% non-GAAP gross margin — margin expansion during a supply-constrained turbine market suggests real but cyclical pricing leverage; the FY2025 10-K frames the core competition as grid electricity and combustion OEMs on cost, which caps pricing through the cycle (sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1664703/000162828026050150/ex991_q226financialresults.htm). | moderate It holds price rather than raising it. On the figures filed with the FY2026 10-K, gross margin was 70.7% of revenue in FY2024 ($4,433M on $6,268M), 70.2% in FY2025 ($4,613M on $6,572M) and 70.7% in FY2026 ($4,899M on $6,925M) - flat across three years in which revenue grew from $6,268M to $6,925M - and it held that level while absorbing a component-cost shock. It is no stronger than that because the filing's own risk factor lists "competitive pricing, customer price sensitivity" and "pricing and discounting pressures" among the drivers of gross margin, and discloses that the company "experienced inflationary pressure and supply chain constraints beginning in the second half of fiscal 2026, resulting in increased costs for memory and other components, which have affected our gross margins" - a cost shock it is absorbing rather than fully passing on. | moderate Item 1 states the businesses 'generally compete on the basis of the quality and variety of the Firm's products and services, transaction execution, innovation, reputation and price' - price is one of several axes, not absent. Item 1A is explicit that 'Actions by competitors could put pressure on the pricing for JPMorganChase's products and services or could cause it to lose market share, particularly with respect to investment products and traditional banking products,' and separately that higher rates can cause 'the loss of deposits, including where customers transition to higher-yielding products.' The filing states no margin trend supporting stronger pricing power. |
| Summary | Bloom's edge is a single solid-oxide platform — 'cell printing, stack assemblies, and column configurations' — that serves both the Energy Server and the Bloom Electrolyzer, protected by 380 active U.S. patents and decades of materials know-how (FY2025 10-K, Item 1). Against its practical competition — grid power, gas reciprocating engines, small gas turbines, and other fuel-cell chemistries (PEM/MCFC/PAFC) — the 10-K claims higher efficiency, no combustion, 99.9% fleet availability on post-2020 non-redundant installs, and deployment in weeks-to-months while turbine OEMs are supply-constrained. That time-to-power window is currently being monetized in AI datacenters: the Q2 2026 release (2026-07-28) reported record revenue of $1,065.4M (+165.5% YoY) and management said all major U.S. hyperscalers have 'validated and approved' Bloom, calling it 'a standard for AI onsite power.' The moat is rated narrow, not wide: the 10-K's own risk factors stress that distributed generation is an emerging market with uncertain acceptance, three customers were 43%/13%/12% of FY2025 revenue, and industry coverage (Energy Changemakers, 2026-07-04) shows FuelCell Energy signing deals of comparable scale — the advantage is a technology-and-execution lead that rivals and turbine capacity additions can compress, not a structural lock. | NetApp sells storage hardware but the asset is ONTAP, the data-management software that has run its arrays for over three decades and now also runs inside the three largest public clouds as a first-party service. The FY2026 10-K organises the company into two segments, Hybrid Cloud (AFF and ASA all-flash arrays, AFX for AI workloads, FAS hybrid-flash, E/EF-Series, StorageGRID object storage) and Public Cloud (Azure NetApp Files, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Cloud Volumes ONTAP), and states that both rest on the same ONTAP software. That is the whole argument: an enterprise that has standardised its snapshots, replication and multiprotocol access on ONTAP carries those habits with it when it moves workloads to a hyperscaler, and NetApp is paid on both sides of the move. The evidence that the lock has commercial value is the margin's steadiness: across the three years the FY2026 10-K reports, gross margin sat at 70.7%, 70.2% and 70.7% of revenue ($4,433M on $6,268M, $4,613M on $6,572M, $4,899M on $6,925M) while revenue grew, and the filing's own percentage-of-revenue table shows no mix shift doing that work - product and services held near 46% and 54% of revenue throughout. The limits are equally in the filing. NetApp is second, not first: IDC's 1Q26 tracker puts it behind Dell in external enterprise storage, and the 10-K's competition section concedes that cloud providers are simultaneously partners and rivals, that consumption models "may reduce overall demand for our traditional on-premises offerings sold through a capital expenditure (capex) model", and that alternative architectures "may reduce or eliminate demand for some of our offerings". Component exposure is real too: the filing discloses "inflationary pressure and supply chain constraints beginning in the second half of fiscal 2026, resulting in increased costs for memory and other components, which have affected our gross margins", and names NAND among the components whose supply can tighten. This is a durable second place built on software stickiness, not a structural monopoly. | Item 1 describes JPMorganChase as 'a leader in investment banking, financial services for consumers and small businesses, commercial banking, financial transaction processing and asset management' operating off a $4.4 trillion balance sheet with $362.4 billion of equity as of December 31, 2025. The protection is the combination of that scale with a regulatory perimeter - Federal Reserve consolidated supervision, a national bank charter under the OCC, and separately licensed broker-dealer and credit-institution subsidiaries in the U.K. and Germany - that bounds who may offer the same product set. The filing is candid that the perimeter is leaking at the edges: it names non-depository and internet-only entrants offering lending, payments processing, cryptocurrency and stablecoins, tokenized securities and algorithmic investment advice, and warns of 'disruption to payments processing... from the use of new technologies that may not require intermediation'. |
| Chain position | Onsite prime-power supplier to AI infrastructure: per the FY2025 10-K, AEP is procuring up to 1 GW of Bloom fuel cells for AI datacenter loads, Brookfield established a financing framework (up to $5.0B over five years at signing, per the 10-K) housed in an AI Infrastructure Fund, and SK ecoplant (a ~2.5% Class A holder) distributes and co-assembles in Korea; the Q2 2026 release adds that all major U.S. hyperscalers plus over a dozen neoclouds, AI labs, and colocation operators have approved Bloom's systems. | NetApp sits between the memory supply and the enterprise data centre. Upstream, the FY2026 10-K says "Third-party component costs make up a significant portion of our product costs" and singles out NAND as hard to manage "if supplies of certain components, including NAND, become limited relative to demand". Downstream, the hyperscalers are channel, partner and rival at once: the filing states "We both partner with and compete against cloud service providers through our cloud-based software and services offerings", while Azure NetApp Files, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes are delivered as those clouds' own natively embedded services. Distribution is a mix of direct sales and "an ecosystem of partners, including the leading cloud providers". | An AI adopter and a possible AI casualty, not an AI supplier: the filing books no AI revenue line and mentions no data-center or model exposure, and instead carries a dedicated risk factor on 'the development of advanced technologies such as AI' warning of 'competitive disadvantage if competitors are able to deploy AI more quickly or effectively' and of 'replacement or disintermediation of direct customer relationships if AI agents autonomously manage or intermediate financial decisions' - so its AI exposure as filed is defensive and operational rather than a supply-chain position. |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.20 at weight 0.20 · swarm bullish Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.30 at weight 0.20 · swarm bullish Editorial prior, not backtested. |