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.
| Cipher Mining | Cloudflare | Pegatron | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | 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 The band is earned by a measured share gap on a hard-to-rebuild asset, not asserted. W3Techs' 17 September 2026 survey (w3techs.com/technologies/overview/proxy) puts Cloudflare in front of 25.8% of all websites, an 85.0% share of the reverse-proxy market, against Amazon CloudFront at 5.5%, Fastly at 3.0% and Akamai at 2.1% - roughly fifteen times the nearest rival. The FY2025 10-K filed 2026-02-26 describes what a challenger would have to reproduce to contest that: a network that 'spans more than 330 cities in over 125 countries worldwide and interconnects with over 13,000 networks globally', architected to 'run every service on every server in every city' - capacity and peering accumulated city by city over a decade, not bought in a quarter. The position has been monetised without margin decay: SEC XBRL fundamentals on this site show GAAP gross margin inside a 74.5-78.7% band in every fiscal year from FY2017 to FY2025 while revenue grew from $134.9M to $2,167.9M, and Cloudflare's Q4/FY2025 results release of 2026-02-10 (cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2026/cloudflare-announces-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2025-financial-results/) reports remaining performance obligations up 48% and new annual contract value up nearly 50% year over year. What stops this being a certainty rather than a judgement: the dominant share sits in application services, while SASE and developer compute are contested by vendors the 10-K itself concedes hold 'substantially greater financial, technical, and other resources.' | none The 2025 annual report (English version filed with TWSE on 2026-05-08) shows scale without a protected position. Consolidated revenue was NT$1,117.2 billion, down from NT$1,125.3 billion, at a gross margin of 3.80%, while DigiTimes put the top 20 EMS/ODM vendors' combined 2025 revenue up 23.4% in US dollars (cnyes, 2026-02-02). One coded customer ("A Company") took 57.34% of 2025 net sales (59.34% in 2024) and a second ("B Company") 9.14%, and the report lists "Intense Competition and Pricing Pressure" and "Customer Concentration and Product Cycle Risks" among its disadvantages. A DigiTimes analysis of the 2024 top 20 (2025-01-27) found Pegatron's net-profit rank six places below its revenue rank, and its net margin at 1.5% or less since 2018 with no clear sign of improvement. A large assembler whose own report and independent data describe no protected return: no moat is claimable. |
| Moat type | 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. | cost scale The FY2025 10-K states the mechanism outright, and it is a unit-cost curve rather than a user-to-user network: 'We have chosen to utilize this idle capacity to create a free tier of service which has generated substantial global scale for us. In turn, this scale makes us attractive partners for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) globally, which reduces our co-location and bandwidth costs. As our network grows, these dynamics become even more powerful.' The same section explains why the curve applies to every line rather than one: the architecture lets Cloudflare 'deploy standard, commodity hardware' and run 'every service on every server in every city', so a new product reaches 330+ cities at near-zero incremental capital. That is what lets the filing claim Workers is offered 'at prices that are highly competitive with public cloud vendors' while FY2025 GAAP gross margin still printed 74.5%. Switching costs (traffic routed through Cloudflare, DNS delegated to it) and threat-intelligence feedback from aggregate traffic sit on top, but the filing-stated primary source is cost falling as the network grows. | none The report's listed competitive advantages are operating capabilities that rivals also have: 4,997 R&D engineers, manufacturing sites in China, the USA, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, India and Taiwan, a diversified product and customer base, global logistics, an experienced management team, and vertical integration across materials from metal stamping and plastic injection to light-metal technologies. R&D was 1.44% of 2025 revenue, and the supplier table notes that "partial major materials are purchased by major customers and resell to the Company for manufacturing and system assembly". Its seat in Apple's supply chain has proved contestable: DigiTimes (via Global SMT, 2025-07-24) says Chinese vendors, "most notably Luxshare, have gained ground through acquisitions and key contract wins, including major entries into Apple's supply chain via asset purchases from Merry Electronics, Lite-On, Wistron, and Pegatron". DigiTimes' analyst wrote (2025-01-27) that Pegatron, Wistron, Compal and Inventec all began as computer-system makers whose component businesses and degree of vertical integration can hardly match those of Chinese makers. |
| Leadership | 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. | clear leader Leadership is measured, not inferred. W3Techs on 2026-09-17 records an 85.0% reverse-proxy market share against 5.5% for Amazon CloudFront and 2.1% for Akamai, and makes Cloudflare the largest authoritative-DNS provider at 18.5% of all websites versus 9.9% for the next-placed GoDaddy Group. The FY2025 10-K reports the enterprise side moving the same way - 4,298 large customers at 2025 year-end against 3,497 a year earlier and 2,756 in 2023 - and the Q4/FY2025 results release (cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2026/cloudflare-announces-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2025-financial-results/) cites the largest annual contract value deal in company history at about $42.5M per year. The band is for the application-services core the share data covers; in SASE and in serverless compute Cloudflare is a challenger to larger incumbents, and no independent placement naming Cloudflare in those markets was obtained for this profile. | behind DigiTimes' July 2025 ranking (via Global SMT, 2025-07-24) says "Pegatron had long held the second spot" until Quanta overtook it in 1H24, that "Luxshare displaced Pegatron to become the No. 3 EMS/ODM vendor in the second half of 2024", and ranks it fourth in 1H25 after Wistron's surge. DigiTimes' 2025 full-year ranking (cnyes, 2026-02-02) lists the top five in order as Foxconn, Wistron, Quanta, Luxshare and Pegatron. In notebooks, market research cited in the annual report puts Pegatron fifth of the five Taiwanese ODMs it lists, at 9.1 million units or 4.96% of worldwide volume. Its 2025 revenue fell 0.73% in NT dollars (annual report) while DigiTimes put Foxconn's up 22.4% and Quanta's up 55.6% in US dollars (cnyes), and 1H26 revenue fell again, by 3.9% to NT$518,553 million (2Q26 business review): losing ground to peers, so behind rather than at parity. |
| Pricing power | 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 Evidence cuts both ways, which is why this is not the top band. For it: GAAP gross margin has never left a 74.5-78.7% band across FY2017-FY2025 (SEC XBRL fundamentals on this site) even as revenue compounded 16x, and the Q4/FY2025 results release (cloudflare.com/press/press-releases/2026/cloudflare-announces-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2025-financial-results/) shows customers committing more rather than less - RPO +48% year over year and new ACV up nearly 50%. Against it: FY2025's 74.5% is the lowest reading in that nine-year series, a large permanent free tier anchors the entry price, the 10-K positions Workers 'at prices that are highly competitive with public cloud vendors', and the competition risk factor warns that larger rivals can 'sell products and services with which we compete at zero or negative margins, offer fee waivers and reductions or other economic and non-economic concessions', with competitive pressure that 'may result in price reductions, fewer subscriptions, reduced revenue and gross margin'. | weak The annual report gives a 2025 gross margin of 3.80%, with gross profit down 7.67% on net sales down 0.73%; the 2Q26 business review shows 1H26 gross margin of 4.4% against 3.4% a year earlier. Among its disadvantages the report says "increasing competition may place pressure on pricing and profitability". DigiTimes (2025-01-27) counted Pegatron among Taiwanese makers whose net margin had been 1.5% or less since 2018, with no clear sign of improvement. |
| Summary | 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. | Cloudflare sells security, performance and connectivity as services delivered from one global anycast network rather than from boxes at a customer's edge. The FY2025 10-K frames the market as a consolidation away from enterprises that 'string together a diverse set of on-premises hardware boxes from different vendors' and away from 'stringing together multiple point-cloud solutions that only address specific network needs', toward one integrated provider it calls the Connectivity Cloud, and places Cloudflare as 'a leader in this Connectivity Cloud category'. The economics are unusual: idle capacity funds a free tier, the free tier buys global traffic scale, that scale makes Cloudflare a peering partner ISPs want, and peering cuts colocation and bandwidth cost - a loop the filing says 'become[s] even more powerful' as the network grows. Independent measurement confirms where that loop has already settled the market: W3Techs on 2026-09-17 shows an 85.0% reverse-proxy share and the largest authoritative-DNS footprint at 18.5% of all websites. Commercially the company ended 2025 with roughly 332,000 paying customers in more than 190 countries and 4,298 large customers, up from 2,756 two years earlier, with no customer above 10% of revenue. The contested half of the story is the growth half: the SASE platform competes with established cloud-security, email-security and SD-WAN vendors, and the developer platform competes for storage and compute against hyperscalers, markets where the 10-K's own risk factors concede rivals have greater name recognition, larger customer bases and 'more mature products and services developed for large customers'. The core is defended; the adjacencies are being fought for, and FY2025 gross margin at a nine-year low of 74.5% is the first visible cost of building GPU capacity for that fight. | Pegatron is a Taiwanese EMS/ODM whose 2025 annual report describes three segments: computing (notebooks, desktops, motherboards, servers), communication (cable modems, set-top boxes, smartphones, switches, routers, gateways, 5G O-RAN) and consumer electronics (tablets, game consoles, wearables, smart home devices, automotive electronics). Communication remained the largest segment in 2025, and one coded customer took 57.34% of net sales. Revenue was NT$1,117.2 billion at a 3.80% gross margin. Servers are the growth line: the report cites large-scale shipments of NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 and HGX B300 systems in 2025, and the 2Q26 business review (2026-08-12) says computing revenue rose 84% year on year, "driven mostly by greater shipment from Server business", taking computing to 23% of revenue while communication fell to 52% after a double-digit decline. Independent rankings show it losing ground: DigiTimes says Pegatron "had long held the second spot" among EMS/ODM vendors by revenue until Quanta passed it in 1H24, and its 2025 full-year ranking puts it fifth behind Foxconn, Wistron, Quanta and Luxshare, with 2026 AI server and rack orders expected to concentrate in Foxconn, Wistron and Quanta. Gross margin improved to 4.4% in 1H26 from 3.4% a year earlier, still thin. A large, diversified assembler without a protected position. |
| Chain position | 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. | Cloudflare sits between end users and whatever hosts the application - origin data centre, public cloud or SaaS - so it is a control layer in front of infrastructure rather than infrastructure a workload runs on, which the 10-K argues is the point: customers 'concerned about being locked in to any one public cloud provider' want policy enforced by 'an independent and integrated services provider'. Two AI-era roles follow from that position. As a supplier, the filing describes 'ongoing deployment of graphics processing units (GPUs) across our global network of servers' behind Workers AI, Vectorize and AI Gateway, putting inference next to the user instead of in a region. As a gatekeeper, the application-services suite now exists in part to 'easily identify, block and control access from AI crawlers and AI agents and operators' and underpins announced efforts to let content creators monetise how those crawlers reach their work - which makes Cloudflare a toll point between AI model builders and the open web. | Contract designer-manufacturer for brand customers in computing, communication and consumer electronics; America took 41.18% and Europe 38.79% of 2025 sales, and some major materials are bought by major customers and resold to Pegatron for assembly (annual report). |
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| Long-horizon vote | -0.06 at weight 0.20 · swarm bearish Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.38 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | -0.20 at weight 0.20 · swarm bearish Editorial prior, not backtested. |