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.
| Cerebras Systems | Palantir Technologies | CrowdStrike | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | narrow One-of-a-kind silicon sold to very few buyers: the IPO prospectus discloses G42 at 24.0% of 2025 revenue (85.0% in 2024), MBZUAI at 62.0% of 2025 revenue, and a December 2025 MRA with OpenAI representing 'a substantial portion of our projected revenues over the next several years' — against a competitive field the same document names as NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, hyperscaler accelerators and the major clouds. | narrow The FY2025 10-K competition section concedes that some competitors have 'greater name recognition, longer operating histories, and larger customer bases', 'larger and more mature intellectual property portfolios', and 'substantially greater financial, technical, and other resources' — and that Palantir is 'fundamentally competing with the internal software development efforts of our potential customers'. A real moat exists but the filing's own disclosure caps it below wide. | narrow Narrow rather than wide because the FY2026 10-K argues both ways and its own risk factors are the harder side: it describes a self-reinforcing data advantage and says "we do not believe any of our competitors currently have a true platform offering equivalent to the Falcon platform", but the same filing calls the market for security and IT operations solutions "intensely competitive, fragmented", warns that "Competitive pricing pressure may reduce our gross profits", and still carries the July 19 Incident as having "had, and is expected to continue to have, an adverse effect on our business, sales, customer and partner relations, reputation" more than two years after it occurred. |
| Moat type | intangibles ip Wafer-scale integration is the moat's substance: the prospectus contrasts the WSE-3's 4 trillion transistors on 46,225 mm² of silicon with NVIDIA's B200 at 208 billion on roughly 1,600 mm² — a commercial chip category with one occupant. | switching costs The 10-K reports that 'our top three customers by revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025, have been with us for an average of ten years' and that a significant portion of revenue comes from existing customers expanding their relationships. The filing explicitly disclaims patent dependence — 'we are not dependent on any particular patent or application' — so the durable source is embedded deployment, not IP. | network effects The 10-K states the mechanism directly: "The more data that is fed into our Falcon platform, the more intelligent the AI Security Cloud becomes, the stronger our ability to anticipate and counter evolving adversary tradecraft, and the more our customers benefit, creating a powerful network effect that increases the overall value we provide." |
| Leadership | clear leader Scoped to the category the record supports: wafer-scale integration has no other commercial occupant per the prospectus's own comparison, and the Q2 release claims — attributed, via AMD and AWS partnerships — leadership in disaggregated inference, a technique the prospectus defines. | at parity The 10-K claims only that 'we believe we generally compete favorably with our competitors', while conceding rivals' greater scale, recognition and resources. The filing does not assert market leadership, so a leader band is not groundable from it. | co leader Co-leader rather than clear leader because the only claim of platform primacy available is the company's own ("we do not believe any of our competitors currently have a true platform offering equivalent"), while the same 10-K describes a fragmented market and lists seven distinct categories of competitor, from legacy antivirus to network security, cloud security, identity and legacy SIEM vendors. |
| Pricing power | moderate The CFO states Q2 'significantly improved core gross and operating margins compared to a year ago' — improving, from a base where three named customers hold most of the revenue and the leverage that comes with it. | strong FY2025 gross profit of $3.7 billion on a gross margin of 82% (84% excluding stock-based compensation), up from 80% (83% ex-SBC) in FY2024 — a sustained and rising 80%+ gross margin. | moderate The 10-K's risk factors state that "Competitive pricing pressure may reduce our gross profits" and that competing successfully may require "aggressive pricing", which is the company's own case against strong pricing power; the offsetting factor it cites is module consolidation on one sensor. |
| Summary | Cerebras bet that AI compute should be one enormous chip rather than many small ones — 'quantities of compute and memory never before assembled on a single commercial chip,' avoiding 'the latency and the power-draw induced by the traditional approach,' in the prospectus's words — and is converting that bet into an inference cloud: Q2 2026 cloud revenue grew 281% with 600 MW of data center capacity under contract and $25.4 billion of remaining performance obligations. The concentration that funded the bet is the risk that remains: two related-party Gulf customers were 86% of 2025 revenue between them, with the OpenAI MRA now layered on top. | Customers who deploy Foundry model their operations in the Ontology and build workflows on top of it, so displacement means rebuilding that layer rather than swapping a vendor — which is why the 10-K frames its main competitor as the customer's own internal build effort. Ten-year average tenure among the top three customers is the filing's own evidence that those deployments persist. | A single lightweight sensor collects enterprise data once and reuses it across 33 cloud modules, and the pooled telemetry trains the models every customer is then defended by — the 10-K calls this crowdsourced, high-fidelity data "cloud-scale AI" and treats it as the fundamental differentiator from competitors. |
| Chain position | Layer-4 wafer-scale accelerators plus an inference cloud — hardware vendor and specialized cloud in one node. | Application-layer software sitting above the cloud and model providers; AIP connects to third-party LLMs rather than supplying them. | AI-native security platform — an adopter and reseller of AI rather than a supplier of AI infrastructure. |
| Products (share / barrier) |
|
|
|
| Long-horizon vote | +0.20 at weight 0.20 · swarm bearish Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.11 at weight 0.20 · swarm bullish Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |