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.
| Core Scientific | Cloudflare | Semtech | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | narrow Core Scientific's position rests on long-dated, take-or-pay leases of energized capacity, not on a protected market. Its 2025 Form 10-K (filed 2026-03-02) says wholesale colocation "typically involves large, long-term agreements with a limited number of customers, often with initial terms of 10 years or more". It adds that such leases are frequently paired with take-or-pay commitments "under which the customer is obligated to pay for leased customer power capacity regardless of utilization, providing operators with revenue visibility over the contract term." On the Q2 2026 call (2026-07-28, https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_fda3a1f2f1890adaa7ac6c4d9d310971/corescientific/db/1085/11280/prepared_remarks/2Q26+Prepared+Remarks+Transcript+PDF.pdf) management said the company "now has approximately 1.1 gigawatts of total contracted billable capacity, representing more than $24 billion of base contracted revenue". That total combines CoreWeave's 590 MW, on what the CFO called "the 12-year lease terms", with AMD agreements for 530 MW that carry "more than $14 billion of base contracted revenue across the 15-year agreements with 2.5% annual escalators". Management also said it was "currently billing for 437 megawatts of capacity". The limits are just as clear. The 10-K says "Competitors compete on price, facility location, reputation and perceived skill with respect to performance" and that many rivals "are more established, have better brand recognition, are well capitalized". It also says "One customer, CoreWeave, currently accounts for 100% of our Colocation segment revenue." The Q2 2026 10-Q says a material weakness tied to converting mining facilities to HPC "has not been remediated". Long take-or-pay terms are the norm in wholesale colocation, so the contracts alone are contracted revenue, not an edge over rivals. What supports narrow is capacity already billing and a tenant that has expanded in place, and even that is bound to those contracts and to one customer today, so the band is narrow, not wide. | 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.' | narrow Semtech’s FY2026 10-K (fiscal year ended January 25, 2026) supports a narrow moat and no more. On the durable side, it owns the LoRa® radio franchise - “our LoRa® devices and wireless radio frequency technology” - which IoT Analytics’ LPWAN Market 2024 release (https://iot-analytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/INSIGHTS-RELEASE-LPWAN-Market-2024.pdf) ranks first outside China at 41% of LPWAN connections, and it argues that scarce analog talent “has historically made it more difficult for new suppliers in the analog market to quickly develop products and gain significant market share.” On the limiting side, the same filing says its patents do not “create definitive competitive barriers to entry”, that average selling prices “have historically decreased rapidly”, that some customers “can stop incorporating our products into their own products with limited notice to us and suffer little or no penalty”, and that customers in China (including Hong Kong) were 47% of fiscal 2026 net sales. The record is uneven: its income statement shows gross profit of $296,250 thousand on net sales of $868,758 thousand in fiscal 2024, $456,528 thousand on $909,287 thousand in fiscal 2025 and $542,144 thousand on $1,049,975 thousand in fiscal 2026, and the 10-K says difficulties “have adversely impacted” its ability to realise the benefits of the Sierra Wireless acquisition. |
| Moat type | switching costs The lock-in is contractual and physical. The 10-K's description of colocation is that "Customers deploy and manage their own hardware, while the operator designs, builds and operates the underlying infrastructure", under take-or-pay leases "often with initial terms of 10 years or more". On the Q2 2026 call the COO described the AMD program as "an integrated colocation platform engineered to support AMD's Helios Rack-Scale systems" with a "close-coupled AMD design framework". Leaving would mean rebuilding that power, cooling and fit-out elsewhere. The relationship with CoreWeave shows the stickiness: it "began with a 16-megawatt lease at our Austin campus in 2024 and has since expanded to 590 megawatts of total contracted capacity". Intellectual property is not the source. The 10-K says the company has "filed over 130 patent applications" but that these laws and procedures "provide only limited protection". Scale is not the source either: the 10-K says rivals are "well capitalized" and some are organized to lower "their external cost of capital". | 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. | intangibles ip The defensible assets the 10-K describes are intellectual: the LoRa® radio technology, analog and mixed-signal design expertise - “The development of IP and the resulting proprietary products is a critical success factor for us” - and 303 U.S. and 541 foreign patents. The filing itself discounts the patent part (“we do not believe they create definitive competitive barriers to entry”), which leaves the moat in proprietary technology and scarce design know-how rather than in scale or lock-in: Semtech outsources most manufacturing, sold 74% of fiscal 2026 net sales through independent distributors, and its customer agreements “do not require them to purchase a minimum quantity of our products”. |
| Leadership | fast follower No independent share or rank was found. The 10-K lists Aligned Data Centers, Compass Datacenters, Equinix, Digital Realty Trust, NTT, QTS, Switch, Vantage Data Centers and CyrusOne as HDC competitors and says "Many of these competitors are more established, have better brand recognition, are well capitalized". It separately names Applied Digital, Cipher Mining, Galaxy Digital, Hut 8, IREN and TeraWulf as miners converting facilities for AI and HPC customers. Against that field Core Scientific is scaling quickly from a small base: 437 MW billing and about 1.1 GW contracted at the Q2 2026 call. That makes it a fast follower behind larger incumbents. Its press releases describe the company as "a leader in designing, building and operating large scale, purpose-built data centers", but that 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. | fast follower LoRa, the technology Semtech owns, leads outside China; elsewhere Semtech is contesting the front rank. IoT Analytics’ March 21, 2024 release states “When excluding all LPWAN data from China, LoRa has the leading share of global LPWAN connections at 41%—more than double NB-IoT’s share”, though “Globally, NB-IoT has the largest share of LPWAN connections at approximately 54%” and “LoRa’s share of LPWAN connections is decreasing”. In data-center optics, management said on the fiscal Q2 2027 call (TradingKey machine transcript, https://www.tradingkey.com/news/transcripts/262131465-tradingkey) that at “800 gig, we had the market share about 18%. So over the 2 years, we have grown the market share well over 50% for 800 gig”, a company figure; an independent September 2024 newsletter (Deep Fundamental) had instead named Marvell and MACOM “the dominant players” in drivers and TIAs and said Semtech “has struggled to keep pace since the transition to 200G”. A third-party lead measured at the technology level rather than as Semtech’s own share, a company-reported share that the only independent view contradicts, and no ranking for its other lines do not evidence co-leadership, so the band is fast follower. |
| Pricing power | moderate Price is set competitively at signing and then locked in. The 10-K says "Competitors compete on price" and warns that "If we fail to accurately estimate the factors upon which we base our contract pricing, we may generate less profit than expected or incur losses on those contracts". Once signed, the AMD agreements carry "2.5% annual escalators" (Q2 2026 call), and the Q2 2026 10-Q says "power costs are passed through to our customer without markup". To win AMD, the company also gave AMD "market-priced warrants to purchase Core Scientific's common stock, subject to certain commercial conditions" (AMD release, 2026-07-28, https://investors.corescientific.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/138/core-scientific-and-amd-announce-infrastructure-partnership). In Q2 2026, colocation revenue was $136,669 thousand and the cost of colocation services was $56,686 thousand, including $35,073 thousand of power fees passed through to the customer (10-Q). Contracted escalators protect price over a 12- to 15-year term, but nothing shows a premium over rivals, so pricing power is moderate. | 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'. | moderate The 10-K describes a market where prices fall: “In the past, we have reduced the average selling prices of our products in anticipation of future competitive pricing pressures”, and Semtech’s products “are typically differentiated in performance but are priced competitively”. Margins have nonetheless climbed with the data-center mix: the fiscal Q2 2027 release (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000088941/000008894126000028/smtc-07262026x8k991.htm) reports GAAP gross margin of 53.8% against 52.1% a year earlier and guides fiscal Q3 adjusted gross margin to 58.3% +/- 100 bps, or 63.9% excluding the business held for sale. The release does not separate price from mix. |
| Summary | Core Scientific began as a bitcoin miner and is turning its sites into high-density colocation (HDC) data centres for AI and HPC tenants. At 31 December 2025 it owned or leased ten data centres across seven U.S. states, with "approximately 1.4 gigawatts ("GW") of gross utility power capacity, or approximately 920 megawatts ("MW") of total leasable customer power capacity", and it intends "to convert every megawatt in our portfolio to high-density colocation infrastructure over the next three years" (2025 10-K). The transition is now visible in the numbers: colocation revenue "represented 77% of total revenue" in the first half of 2026, against 12% a year earlier (Q2 2026 10-Q). By July 2026 the company was billing for 437 MW. It had about 1.1 GW contracted with two anchor customers, CoreWeave at 590 MW and AMD at 530 MW (about 380 MW leased directly to AMD and about 150 MW for a neocloud that AMD backs), and AMD holds an exclusive right, under specified conditions, to lease as much as 2 additional gigawatts (Q2 2026 call). Those long take-or-pay contracts, plus energized power at a time when the 10-K says utilities demand "significant collateral postings at contract execution" and large builds take "18 to 24 months, or longer", are the source of a narrow advantage. They do not make a protected franchise. The 10-K names nine established colocation providers and six converted miners as competitors, says competitors "compete on price", and reports that CoreWeave was 100 percent of colocation revenue. The Q2 2026 10-Q says colocation revenue "is concentrated with a single customer" and that the conversion-related material weakness is still unremediated. Build costs are "approximately $11 million to $12 million per megawatt" (Q2 2026 call), and the company expects to finance the AMD build-out through project-level bonds. Core Scientific is rated as having a narrow moat: contract-bound switching costs, with no evidence of a price premium or a scale advantage. | 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. | Semtech is an analog and mixed-signal chipmaker being reshaped around two franchises. The first is AI data-center connectivity in its Signal Integrity segment - FiberEdge TIAs and drivers for optical transceivers and CopperEdge redrivers for active copper cables - whose net sales the FY2026 10-K reports at $322,608 thousand in fiscal 2026 against $177,033 thousand in fiscal 2024; the March 2026 HieFo acquisition added foundries that make devices for data-center interconnects. The second is LoRa, the long-range, low-power radio that IoT Analytics ranks as the leading LPWAN technology outside China. Around them sit protection devices, sensing and power products, and the IoT Systems business inherited from Sierra Wireless, whose cellular-module unit Semtech has agreed to sell to Compal Electronics for US$62 million (ABI Research, September 9, 2026, https://www.abiresearch.com/market-research/insight/7788486-compal-electronics-takes-semtechs-mantle-t). Momentum is strong: the fiscal Q2 2027 release reports record net sales of $341.9 million, up 33% year over year, and management said data-center revenue hit a record $100 million in the quarter. But the 10-K is frank about limits - rapid ASP erosion, customers that can drop its parts with little notice, 47% of sales to China, competitors that are “much larger and better resourced than we are”, and patents that do not bar entry. Proprietary technology in two growing niches, rather than a locked-in customer base, makes the moat narrow. |
| Chain position | Core Scientific leases powered, liquid-cooled data-centre capacity to AI compute providers: CoreWeave (590 MW) and AMD, including a neocloud that AMD backs (about 530 MW), per the Q2 2026 call. It sits between utilities and GPU cloud operators while it winds down bitcoin self-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. | Semtech sells mostly through independent distributors (74% of fiscal 2026 net sales) to OEMs. In AI data centers its FiberEdge and CopperEdge parts go into the optical transceivers and active copper cables that module and cable makers build, and the 10-K says hyperscale cloud providers “are generally our indirect customers”. Two customers took 14% and 11% of fiscal 2026 net sales, and customers in China (including Hong Kong) 47%. |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.06 at weight 0.20 · swarm bullish Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.38 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.06 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |