Compare moats

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.

source: sec.gov

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.

source: sec.gov

Johnson Controls' FY2025 Form 10-K (fiscal year ended 30 September 2025, filed 2025-11-14) describes a real but bounded edge. On the advantage side it says "The Company's large base of current customers leads to significant repeat business for the maintenance, retrofit and replacement markets" and that it "is also able to leverage its installed base to generate sales for its service business"; Item 1A adds that its direct channel "creates a large installed base of our fire and security solutions and HVAC equipment, and creates opportunities for longer term service, monitoring, solutions and retrofit revenue over the lifecycle of the building." Stored fundamentals from the same 10-K show gross profit of $7,804 million on $22,331 million of revenue in fiscal 2023, $8,077 million on $22,952 million in fiscal 2024 and $8,592 million on $23,596 million in fiscal 2025. On the limiting side, the Competition section says the company works through contracts "either negotiated or awarded on a competitive basis", with price among the key award factors, names its larger competitors as Honeywell, Siemens Smart Infrastructure, Schneider Electric, Carrier Global, Trane Technologies, Vertiv, API Group and Daikin, and says it "competes in a highly fragmented building services market". Item 1A adds that backlog orders are a commodity-cost risk "as prices on such orders are typically fixed" and that reduced demand "may also erode average selling prices". An installed-base and service edge contested by several large peers is a narrow moat, not a wide one.

source: sec.gov

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.

source: sec.gov

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.

source: sec.gov

The 10-K places the advantage in the installed base and the service relationship that follows it, not in patents: it says "no single patent, or group of patents, is critical to the success of the business", while "The Company's large base of current customers leads to significant repeat business for the maintenance, retrofit and replacement markets." Item 1A says "Unlike many of our competitors, we rely on a direct sales channel for a substantial portion of our revenue", which installs HVAC equipment the company manufactures and "creates opportunities for longer term service, monitoring, solutions and retrofit revenue over the lifecycle of the building." Services were 32% of fiscal 2025 sales from continuing operations, and remaining performance obligations of $22.7 billion include large contracts for hospitals, schools and other governmental buildings with "average initial contract terms of 25 to 35 years". On the Q2 fiscal 2026 call (2026-05-06, https://s21.q4cdn.com/502874060/files/doc_earnings/2026/q2/transcript/Q2-2026-Transcript.pdf) the CEO described a service sales pilot that began in West Florida and said it "led to tripling service agreements immediately following new chiller startup commissioning." Equipment that stays in a building for its life and pulls service, controls and retrofit work behind it is a switching-cost source.

source: sec.gov

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.

source: sec.gov

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.

source: sec.gov

The only independent evidence is dated and covers one end market: Omdia's data center cooling research on the 2023 market, as reported on 2024-06-19 (https://www.intelligentcio.com/north-america/2024/06/19/omdia-research-predicts-data-center-cooling-market-to-reach-16-87-billion-in-2028/), said "Vertiv, Johnson Controls and Stulz retained their top three positions – Vertiv notably gained 6% market share due to strong North American demand and cloud partnerships." Across buildings as a whole the leadership claims are the company's own: the 10-K calls it "a global leader in smart, healthy and sustainable buildings" with "leading positions in attractive and growing end-markets across HVAC, controls, fire, security and services", and on the Q2 fiscal 2026 call the CEO said demand was "led by data centers where we're holding a leading position". The 10-K's Competition section names Honeywell, Siemens Smart Infrastructure, Schneider Electric, Carrier Global, Trane Technologies, Vertiv, API Group and Daikin as larger competitors. That ranking describes the 2023 market, covers data-centre cooling only, lists Vertiv first and records Vertiv gaining share; no newer independent ranking was found, and the wider leadership claims are the company's own, so the band is fast follower rather than co-leader.

source: sec.gov

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.

source: sec.gov

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.

source: sec.gov

Price is contributing but bounded. In prepared remarks on the Q2 fiscal 2026 call (2026-05-06) the CFO said Americas adjusted segment EBITDA margin "improved 100 basis points to 19.5%, driven by higher volume and price realization", though in Q&A he said "a lot of that came from pure growth and leverage"; on tariffs he said "we'll be able to pass on some of that risk to pricing dynamics in the market." Stored fundamentals from the FY2025 10-K show gross profit of $7,804 million on $22,331 million of revenue (fiscal 2023), $8,077 million on $22,952 million (fiscal 2024) and $8,592 million on $23,596 million (fiscal 2025). The limits are in Item 1A: on backlog "prices on such orders are typically fixed; therefore, in the short-term, our ability to adjust for changes in certain commodity prices is limited"; "many of our customers permit quarterly or other periodic adjustments to pricing" but "we may bear the risk of price increases that occur between any such repricing"; and reduced demand "may also erode average selling prices". On the same call the CEO said that in security service "the balance between volume and price probably hasn't been appropriately been managed" and that it is "a little less differentiated, HVAC Applied being the most differentiated."

source: sec.gov

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.

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.

Johnson Controls sits on the facility side of the AI build-out: the 10-K lists data centers among the customers of all three regional segments and under "Capitalize on Key Growth Vectors", and Item 1A names "cooling technology (including liquid cooling)" as a capability it must keep developing. On the Q2 fiscal 2026 call the CEO said its Silent-Aire air-handling franchise "is enjoying very healthy growth" even as liquid cooling is adopted, and that the CDU business "has just started to ramp".

• Bitcoin mining (Odessa) Unknown · Low source: sec.gov
• HPC data center leasing (Black Pearl, Barber Lake, Stingray) Challenger · Moderate source: sec.gov

• CUDA accelerated-computing software platform (CUDA-X, NVIDIA AI Enterprise) Leader · Deep source: sec.gov
• Data Center AI accelerators (GPU — Blackwell/Hopper) Leader · Deep source: sec.gov
• Data-center networking / interconnect (NVLink, InfiniBand, Spectrum Ethernet, DPUs) Top 3 · Moderate source: sec.gov

• Building controls and OpenBlue digital platform Unknown · Moderate source: sec.gov
• Building services (maintenance, repair, retrofit and replacement) Unknown · Moderate source: sec.gov
• Commercial and industrial HVAC equipment and refrigeration Unknown · Moderate source: sec.gov
• Data center cooling (YORK chillers, Silent-Aire air handling, CDUs) Top 3 · Moderate source: intelligentcio.com
• Fire detection, fire suppression and security systems Unknown · Moderate source: sec.gov

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