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.
| Digital Realty Trust | Broadcom | Alibaba Group | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moat rating | narrow The FY2025 10-K's own competitive record cuts both ways. Item 1 says a "high-quality, highly interconnected global portfolio such as ours could not be easily replicated today on a cost-competitive basis," yet Item 1A concedes that competitors have "significantly greater financial, marketing and other resources and more ready access to capital" and that as rivals keep developing space, "rental rates may be reduced or we may face delays in leasing." A durable advantage that its own filing says new supply can price against is bounded, not unassailable. | wide The FY2025 10-K describes category-leading franchises across a broad semiconductor portfolio plus acquired infrastructure software (VMware, CA, Symantec), with top-five end customers at approximately 40% of net revenue — diversified concentration by AI-supply-chain standards — and the Q3 FY2026 release shows non-GAAP operating margin guided at approximately 66% of revenue while revenue grew 86%. | wide The FY2026 20-F rests on two entrenched positions: a commerce ecosystem the filing ties to 'the world's largest online retail market' with 'over 1.1 billion Internet users,' and a cloud business whose 'Cloud Intelligence Group's external revenue growth accelerated to 40% in the final quarter of fiscal 2026, with AI-related products accounting for 30% of this revenue.' Two durable franchises under one roof is a wide moat — bounded by China regulation and US ICTS cloud controls the same filing flags. |
| Moat type | network effects Item 1 attributes the hard-to-replicate part of the portfolio to connectivity rather than to real estate: "the network density, interconnection infrastructure and connectivity-centric customers in certain of our data centers have led to the organic formation of densely connected data communities that are difficult for competitors to replicate." That community sits on over 232,000 cross connects in over 55 metros, so each network and cloud that lands makes the same building worth more to the next tenant. | switching costs The 10-K describes custom accelerators (XPUs) co-designed for hyperscalers and AI frontier-model companies — multi-year, customer-specific silicon programs — alongside enterprise infrastructure software; both are positions a customer leaves only at high cost. | network effects The 20-F names 'the network effects of our ecosystems' among the factors its business depends on: Taobao and Tmall, Alipay, Amap and the rest compound as buyers, sellers and services reinforce each other across one integrated ecosystem. |
| Leadership | co leader Item 1 claims the title of "the largest global provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral data center, colocation and interconnection solutions," but the Competition section names Equinix and NTT as operators of properties "similar to ours in some of the same metropolitan areas," plus Global Switch and regional operators abroad — a shared top tier on the company's own telling, not a solitary one. | clear leader The 10-K claims 'category-leading semiconductor and infrastructure software solutions' — the company's own attribution — and the Q3 FY2026 release reports AI semiconductor revenue of $16.7 billion in one quarter, up 221% year over year, a scale no other custom-accelerator design house reports. | clear leader The 20-F claims leadership in applied AI ('strengthened our leadership in applied AI') and roots the commerce business in the world's largest online retail market; Alibaba Cloud is the leading China hyperscaler pivoting to AI, per the segment discussion — a category leader in both its home markets. |
| Pricing power | strong FY2025 renewals signed re-priced upward in every bucket — +27.0% on greater-than-1 MW space ($146 to $186 per square foot), +4.6% on 0-1 MW ($268 to $280) and +43.0% on other ($49 to $71) — and MD&A expects average aggregate rental rates on 2026 renewals to be positive against the rates currently paid for the same space "on a GAAP basis and on a cash basis." On costs, the filing says utilities expense "is our largest expense category" and that "the vast majority of the expense is passed directly through to our customers," which it credits with significantly mitigating exposure to power-cost increases rather than removing it. The cap: Item 1A warns competitor development could still force rates down. | strong Q4 FY2026 non-GAAP operating income is guided at approximately 66% of revenue, flat from a year ago, while consolidated revenue is guided up 93% — margin held through a near-doubling of revenue. | moderate Ecosystem lock-in and cloud scale support pricing, but the filing warns that if 'user activity and engagement in our ecosystem may decrease … our market share and profitability may be negatively affected,' and Chinese e-commerce/cloud competition is intense — real but capped pricing power. |
| Summary | Digital Realty rents space, power and connectivity rather than compute: at 2025 year-end its portfolio held 310 data centers and roughly 57.6 million rentable square feet across more than 55 metros in over 30 countries, about 84.7% leased, serving more than 5,000 customers. Two different businesses sit inside that footprint. The greater-than-1 MW wholesale side is a capital-and-power race — 769 MW of projects underway with 64% pre-leased, and land that "could accommodate over 3,500 megawatts of additional data center capacity" — where the 10-K names Equinix, NTT, Global Switch and "various private operators" as rivals and warns that added supply can push rents down. The colocation and interconnection side is the defended half: over 232,000 cross connects and the "densely connected data communities" Item 1 says competitors cannot easily replicate, reinforced by contracts the filing describes as generally running 5-10+ years on large deployments and by improvements "installed at our customers' expense." FY2025 leasing supports that read — renewals signed re-priced +27.0% on greater-than-1 MW space and +4.6% on 0-1 MW — while customer concentration is the offsetting exposure, with the largest customer at roughly 11.7% of annualized recurring revenue. | Broadcom holds two moats under one roof. In AI silicon it is the design partner for custom accelerators and the merchant supplier of the Ethernet switching, NIC, PHY and optical parts that connect them — 'connectivity at scale, within and across AI server racks and across AI data center sites' in the filing's words. In software it owns acquired enterprise franchises. The 10-K's own competition section flags the counterweight: competition is increasing 'as new companies, including some of our customers, enter the markets.' | Alibaba is a commerce network and an AI cloud fused into one ecosystem. The retail side draws its moat from network effects the filing names explicitly, rooted in the world's largest online retail market; the cloud side is pivoting hard into AI — Alibaba Cloud's 'growth engine fully pivots from traditional compute and storage to models, AI compute, and agent services,' anchored by the in-house Qwen family (Qwen3.7-Max 'specifically engineered for agents') and the PAI platform. The 20-F's own framing is 'leading full-stack capabilities across the AI value chain.' The counterweights are structural rather than competitive: a Cayman VIE structure, China's regulatory environment, and the US Commerce Department's proposed ICTS cloud-computing controls the filing discloses. |
| Chain position | Landlord to the AI stack — sells the space, power and interconnection that cloud, network and enterprise tenants run compute in (Oracle, IBM, Meta Platforms, AT&T, Comcast and Lumen are among the customers named in Item 1), with roughly 2.9 GW of total in-place IT capacity. | Layer-4 chip supplier twice over: custom accelerators for hyperscalers and the Ethernet switching/optical silicon between every AI rack. | Layer-8 hyperscaler + AI-application incumbent: Alibaba Cloud supplies AI compute and the Qwen models while the commerce ecosystem is a vast applied-AI distribution surface. |
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| Long-horizon vote | +0.17 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.42 at weight 0.20 · swarm bullish Editorial prior, not backtested. | +0.38 at weight 0.20 · swarm neutral Editorial prior, not backtested. |