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 | Salesforce | Tencent Holdings | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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. | narrow Salesforce's own language caps this at narrow: Item 1 calls its market "highly competitive, rapidly evolving and fragmented, and subject to changing technology with low barriers to entry." What holds it above none is scale and contract duration: $72.4B total RPO at 2026-01-31 versus $63.4B (+14%), current RPO $35.1B versus $30.2B (+16%), on revenue of $41.5B (+10%). But cRPO growth "was positively impacted by three percent" by currency, and total RPO "includes approximately $2.2 billion" from Informatica, acquired November 2025. Adjusted, the contracted base still outgrows revenue, but by less than the headline implies. | wide The 2025 Annual Report reports combined MAU of Weixin and WeChat of 1,418 million at 31 December 2025, still growing 2% year-on-year and 0.3% quarter-on-quarter off a 1.4-billion-account base, while group gross margin rose to 56% from 53% and Marketing Services revenue grew 19% to RMB145.0 billion 'primarily driven by growth in pricing and ad impressions'. Rising price on a still-growing user base of that size is the signature of a wide moat, not a contested one. |
| 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. | switching costs Switching costs, with a caveat: the filing's clearest lock-in sentence is about rivals' customers, not its own. "Many prospective customers have invested substantial personnel and financial resources to implement and integrate their current enterprise software... may be reluctant or unwilling to migrate away" is a headwind to Salesforce's own growth. Evidence for its own base is architectural: Data 360 unifies data into "a single, governed source of truth," Agentforce runs on existing processes "without requiring customers to remove and rebuild," behind $72.4B of contracted revenue. Contracts run "typically 12 to 36 months" with no renewal obligation. | network effects The report attributes Marketing Services pricing growth to 'an increasing proportion of closed-loop ads (where the user clicks through to native transactional experiences, such as Mini Programs, Mini Shops, or Mini Games)' and describes growing engagement with Mini Shops, Mini Games and content Mini Programs 'by strengthening Weixin's commerce experience and content ecosystem' - merchants and developers building inside the user graph rather than beside it, which is a network effect rather than a switching cost or a scale cost advantage. |
| 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 Clear leader in the category as it exists today, runner-up in the one it is being rebuilt into. Per IDC's Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker on 2025 data, Salesforce was first in worldwide CRM applications for a thirteenth consecutive year at 20.0% share, and first in Sales (fourteenth year), Customer Service (thirteenth), Marketing (seventh), model-driven application platform (eleventh) and Integration (fourth). These come from Salesforce announcing its own IDC results via a trade outlet, in translation, not IDC primary material. In the same tracker's new Agent Build and Deploy segment it ranked second at 17.5%, albeit as fastest-growing vendor. | clear leader The only explicit leadership claims in the report are the Company's own: Tencent Video 'maintained its leading position in China's long-form video market' and Tencent Music 'extended its leading position in China's music streaming market'. Against a 1,418 million combined Weixin/WeChat MAU base, the report asserts leadership in the adjacent content markets and no competitor is named anywhere in it. |
| 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 Gross margin rises across the Item 7 table — gross profit of $32,255M on $41,525M of revenue, 78% of total revenues in FY2026 against 77% in FY2025 and 75% in FY2024 — yet MD&A denies price as the cause: growth "was primarily caused by volume-driven increases from new business," and "Pricing was not a significant driver of the increase in revenues for the period." Item 1A names consumption-based pricing among attrition factors, says Agentforce and Data 360 monetization "remain relatively new and uncertain," and concedes "limited experience with determining optimal pricing for our consumption-based contracts." | strong Group gross margin was 56% for 2025, up from 53%, with segment gross margins of 60% for VAS (from 57%), 58% for Marketing Services (from 55%) and 51% for FinTech and Business Services (from 47%); Marketing Services revenue growth is attributed 'primarily' to pricing, and the Chairman's Statement notes ad load 'remained at a much lower level than peers'' - price is rising with monetisation headroom still unused. |
| 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. | Salesforce is the incumbent of record in CRM applications and is paid like one: $41.5B of FY2026 revenue (+10%), 78% gross margin, $72.4B of contracted revenue not yet recognized, and first place in worldwide CRM for a thirteenth consecutive year at 20.0% share per IDC's tracker as announced by Salesforce. Enterprise data and workflow embedded through Data 360 and Agentforce is costly to unwind, and the agentic layer is deliberately built atop existing processes rather than requiring re-implementation. The limits are the company's own: it twice describes its market as having low barriers to entry, names AI-native startups whose solutions "may bypass traditional business process workflows or displace established user interfaces," ranks second at 17.5% in IDC's new Agent Build and Deploy segment, and concedes pricing did not drive FY2026 growth. | The textbook answer holds, but not for the textbook reason. Weixin's value is that third parties transact inside it: the report ties Marketing Services growth to closed-loop ads landing in Mini Programs, Mini Shops and Mini Games, ties Business Services growth to 'higher eCommerce technology service fees, underpinned by growth in Mini Shops GMV', and reports that ad load 'remained at a much lower level than peers', so the graph is being monetised deliberately below capacity. On gaming regulation the record is thinner than the received narrative implies: a Hong Kong annual report carries no Risk Factors and no Competition section, and the only place game licensing appears is the Structure Contracts disclosure, where Circular 13 (2009) is discussed as a foreign-ownership question - PRC legal advisers say the arrangement does not violate existing law, while warning of 'substantial uncertainties regarding the interpretation and application' of it. So the disclosed regulatory exposure is structural (VIE legality) rather than an operating constraint on game approvals; the filing simply does not speak to approval throughput at all, and any moat claim resting on it would be unsourced. |
| 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. | Applications-layer incumbent: sells enterprise CRM and agentic software to end customers across industries, consumes cloud infrastructure (third-party IaaS partners plus its own Hyperforce estate) and third-party LLMs, and sits upstream of no hardware supply chain. Exposure is to enterprise software budgets and to whether the agentic layer is captured by incumbent suites or AI-native entrants. | Both a downstream AI deployer and an upstream supplier: the report says Tencent Cloud 'achieved profit at scale due to increased enterprise demand for AI workloads' while AI is also credited with improving its own ad targeting and game content production. |
| Products (share / barrier) |
|
|
|
| Long-horizon vote | -0.06 at weight 0.20 · swarm bearish Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.20 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.42 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |