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.
| CoreWeave | NetApp | Everspin Technologies | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | narrow The FY2025 10-K describes a purpose-built AI cloud with a real performance edge, but its own risk section discloses the defining constraint: 'approximately 67% of our revenue from our top customer, Microsoft, for the year ended December 31, 2025' — a specialized platform whose economics rest on one buyer that is also a hyperscaler competitor is narrow, not wide. | narrow The FY2026 10-K shows a real, durable lock but not an unassailable one. On the durable side: "Our cloud storage services are based on the same ONTAP data management software that underpins our on-premises ONTAP storage infrastructure offerings", and the same filing's income statement shows the company holding a gross margin near 71% across all three reported years - $4,433M on $6,268M in FY2024, $4,613M on $6,572M in FY2025 and $4,899M on $6,925M in FY2026 - while revenue grew from $6,268M to $6,925M and income from operations widened from 19% to 24% of net revenues. Holding that margin through the memory-cost shock the same filing discloses is the commercial evidence the lock is worth something. On the limiting side, the filing says competition "is intense", that in public cloud "customers may choose native cloud services that are consumed as operating expenses", and that "New competitors or alliances among existing competitors could emerge and quickly gain significant market share" - and IDC's 1Q26 external-storage tracker (Blocks & Files, 2026-06-16, cited on the AFF/ASA product row below) ranks NetApp second behind Dell, not first. | narrow Everspin owns an MRAM process and IP position that buyers, including the U.S. government, pay to secure, but the business is small and its profits are thin. The FY2025 10-K cites 'over 20 years of MRAM technology and manufacturing leadership' and calls Everspin 'the leading supplier of discrete MRAM components'. That is the company's own claim, and no tracker share was found, so the rating stays modest. On 2026-04-24 Everspin signed a $40,000,000 subcontract with Amentum under a Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division prime contract. The program's objective is for the U.S. government to have 'a set of proven processes and manufacturing capability' for new Toggle MRAM for use in strategic systems (8-K). Returns are thin. The 10-K reports revenue of $55.2 million and $50.4 million, gross margin of 51.2% and 51.8%, and a net loss of $0.6 million and net income of $0.8 million for 2025 and 2024. It also warns that larger competitors 'may be better positioned to accept lower prices'. |
| Moat type | cost scale The 10-K grounds the advantage in purpose-built infrastructure — first-to-deploy NVIDIA GB200/GB300 NVL72 systems and a data-center fabric 'designed to harness the full potential of each GPU' — a performance-per-dollar edge at scale, not a customer lock. | switching costs The FY2026 10-K makes the source of the advantage explicit and it is the cost of leaving the data-management layer, not a network or a patent estate. The same ONTAP software runs the on-premises arrays and the cloud services ("Our cloud storage services are based on the same ONTAP data management software that underpins our on-premises ONTAP storage infrastructure offerings"), and the AFF family "allows customers to connect to clouds for more data services, data tiering, caching, and disaster recovery". A customer's volume layout, snapshot and replication workflow and operating tools therefore carry from the array into Azure, AWS and Google rather than being abandoned at the cloud boundary — the filing describes NetApp as "the only provider of enterprise-grade storage services natively embedded in the world's largest public cloud providers", so the usual moment of escape is instead the moment the relationship renews. | intangibles ip The advantage is process know-how and patents, not scale. The 10-K reports 596 issued patents and 141 pending applications as of 2025-12-31, and Everspin earns money from them. GLOBALFOUNDRIES 'will pay royalties' on each wafer it sells or transfers that uses 'certain Everspin design information', and during an exclusivity period it agreed 'not to license intellectual property developed in connection with the agreement to our named competitors'. Under the Amentum subcontract (8-K, 2026-04-24), Everspin 'will provide process know-how and IP for Toggle MRAM manufacturing in case the Company exits the Toggle MRAM business'. The IP is contested. The 10-K discloses that Avalanche Technology filed a patent lawsuit in Delaware and a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission in January 2026. MRAM-Info (2026-02-06) reports the suit covers four STT-MRAM patents. |
| Leadership | co leader The 10-K positions CoreWeave as a first-to-deploy specialist against hyperscalers who offer AI compute 'as part of a broader product portfolio' — a leader of the purpose-built neocloud niche, not of the AI-cloud market its own filing says it competes in. | co leader IDC's 1Q26 external enterprise storage systems tracker, as reported by Blocks & Files on 2026-06-16 (cited in full on the AFF/ASA product row below), ranks NetApp second worldwide behind Dell and ahead of Everpure, Huawei and HPE, attributing the placing to "its growing all-flash business and cloud-integrated data management". Second of five ranked vendors, in a market whose leader is someone else, is a shared front rank rather than an owned one - and the distinct claim NetApp makes in the FY2026 10-K is positional rather than volumetric: being "the only provider of enterprise-grade storage services natively embedded in the world's largest public cloud providers". | fast follower The leadership claim is Everspin's own, and a rival contests it. The 10-K calls Everspin 'the leading supplier of discrete MRAM components', and the 2Q26 release calls it 'the world's leading developer and manufacturer' of MRAM persistent memory. No tracker share was found. A rival sells in the same niche: MRAM-Info (2024-03-27) reports that Avalanche Technology launched 2Gb and 8Gb space-grade STT-MRAM devices. Everspin's 10-K lists its DRAM-replacement STT-MRAM at 1Gb density. Outside MRAM, the 10-K describes Everspin as 'an emerging specialty memory product supplier' that competes with much larger SRAM, FRAM, NVSRAM, DRAM and NOR vendors. |
| Pricing power | moderate A first-to-deploy performance edge on scarce new NVIDIA systems supports pricing while the hardware is scarce, but 67% single-customer concentration is buyer leverage the filing states outright. | moderate It holds price rather than raising it. On the figures filed with the FY2026 10-K, gross margin was 70.7% of revenue in FY2024 ($4,433M on $6,268M), 70.2% in FY2025 ($4,613M on $6,572M) and 70.7% in FY2026 ($4,899M on $6,925M) - flat across three years in which revenue grew from $6,268M to $6,925M - and it held that level while absorbing a component-cost shock. It is no stronger than that because the filing's own risk factor lists "competitive pricing, customer price sensitivity" and "pricing and discounting pressures" among the drivers of gross margin, and discloses that the company "experienced inflationary pressure and supply chain constraints beginning in the second half of fiscal 2026, resulting in increased costs for memory and other components, which have affected our gross margins" - a cost shock it is absorbing rather than fully passing on. | moderate Gross margin has stayed above half of revenue. The 10-K reports 51.8% for 2024 and 51.2% for 2025, and the 2026-08-05 release reports 53.9% for 2Q26, up from 51.3% a year earlier. The premium has limits. The 10-K lists 'customer adoption of MRAM technology despite the price per bit premium of our products versus competing technologies' as a competitive factor, and its risk factors describe markets with 'declining average selling prices'. |
| Summary | CoreWeave sells a full-lifecycle AI cloud — training, inference, data movement, agentic workflows — on infrastructure 'purpose-built to accelerate breakthroughs by AI pioneers,' with the Weights & Biases acquisition adding the developer tooling layer as 'a single stack.' The edge the filing claims is speed and efficiency on the newest NVIDIA systems. The moat's ceiling is in the same document's risk factors: 67% of 2025 revenue came from Microsoft, and the hyperscalers it competes with are 'also customers of, and partners to, CoreWeave' — the largest buyer and the largest rival are the same companies. | NetApp sells storage hardware but the asset is ONTAP, the data-management software that has run its arrays for over three decades and now also runs inside the three largest public clouds as a first-party service. The FY2026 10-K organises the company into two segments, Hybrid Cloud (AFF and ASA all-flash arrays, AFX for AI workloads, FAS hybrid-flash, E/EF-Series, StorageGRID object storage) and Public Cloud (Azure NetApp Files, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes, Cloud Volumes ONTAP), and states that both rest on the same ONTAP software. That is the whole argument: an enterprise that has standardised its snapshots, replication and multiprotocol access on ONTAP carries those habits with it when it moves workloads to a hyperscaler, and NetApp is paid on both sides of the move. The evidence that the lock has commercial value is the margin's steadiness: across the three years the FY2026 10-K reports, gross margin sat at 70.7%, 70.2% and 70.7% of revenue ($4,433M on $6,268M, $4,613M on $6,572M, $4,899M on $6,925M) while revenue grew, and the filing's own percentage-of-revenue table shows no mix shift doing that work - product and services held near 46% and 54% of revenue throughout. The limits are equally in the filing. NetApp is second, not first: IDC's 1Q26 tracker puts it behind Dell in external enterprise storage, and the 10-K's competition section concedes that cloud providers are simultaneously partners and rivals, that consumption models "may reduce overall demand for our traditional on-premises offerings sold through a capital expenditure (capex) model", and that alternative architectures "may reduce or eliminate demand for some of our offerings". Component exposure is real too: the filing discloses "inflationary pressure and supply chain constraints beginning in the second half of fiscal 2026, resulting in increased costs for memory and other components, which have affected our gross margins", and names NAND among the components whose supply can tighten. This is a durable second place built on software stickiness, not a structural monopoly. | Everspin is a small specialist in MRAM, a non-volatile memory. Freescale spun it out in 2008. Its lines are Toggle MRAM (128kb to 32Mb, in production since 2008), STT-MRAM (1Gb parts with DDR3 and DDR4 derivative interfaces, plus 16Mb to 256Mb serial parts aimed at NOR replacement), TMR sensors, and IP licensing and foundry services. It adds its magnetic layers to purchased CMOS wafers on a leased 200mm line in Chandler, Arizona. Its higher-density STT-MRAM wafers come from GLOBALFOUNDRIES, its single foundry for those products. In April 2026 it signed two agreements. The first is a ten-year foundry agreement under which Microchip will make MRAM, TMR sensor and STT-MRAM wafers at its Gresham, Oregon fab, with Toggle and sensor capacity expected about 18 months after signing. The second is the $40,000,000 Amentum subcontract to develop on-shore Toggle MRAM production for U.S. strategic systems. In 2025 revenue was $55.2 million at a 51.2% gross margin, and more than 1,405 end customers bought its products. The two largest end customers took 33% of revenue. In 2Q26 revenue reached a record $18.7 million and gross margin was 53.9%. GAAP operating expenses rose to $14.5 million from $8.7 million, giving a GAAP net loss of $(3.6) million. Avalanche Technology is suing over four STT-MRAM patents. The verdict is a narrow moat. Everspin holds a defensible MRAM process and IP niche that the U.S. government is paying to secure. But the business is small, its profits are thin, and its higher-density line faces a patent challenge and much larger memory rivals. |
| Chain position | Layer-8 purpose-built AI neocloud — first-to-deploy NVIDIA systems for training and inference at scale. | NetApp sits between the memory supply and the enterprise data centre. Upstream, the FY2026 10-K says "Third-party component costs make up a significant portion of our product costs" and singles out NAND as hard to manage "if supplies of certain components, including NAND, become limited relative to demand". Downstream, the hyperscalers are channel, partner and rival at once: the filing states "We both partner with and compete against cloud service providers through our cloud-based software and services offerings", while Azure NetApp Files, Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP and Google Cloud NetApp Volumes are delivered as those clouds' own natively embedded services. Distribution is a mix of direct sales and "an ecosystem of partners, including the leading cloud providers". | Upstream supplier of persistent memory to makers of industrial, medical, automotive and transportation, aerospace and defense, and data-center equipment. GLOBALFOUNDRIES makes its 300mm STT-MRAM wafers, its Chandler line adds the magnetic layers for Toggle, and Microchip's Gresham fab is contracted for future capacity. |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.13 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.06 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |