Seventeen companies. Seven Structural, seven Cyclical, three Exposed. A few patterns stood out to us after sorting these companies.
Cyclical is the biggest bucket. That's what a capex supercycle looks like from the supply side. You have merchant power operators capturing spot prices, along with utilities making rate-based bets. Then the equipment suppliers whose backlogs are the build-out's backlog. This is also where earnings are showing up most dramatically in 2026 and where they'll compress most visibly when the cycle turns. Several of these are excellent businesses. They're just excellent businesses at a moment when the market is paying them for the moment -- not for the decade.
Pure-play exposure differs from durable exposure. Vertiv and Eaton both sell into the data center. Comfort Systems and EMCOR both wire it. In each pair, the diversified operator ended up Structural, and the pure-play ended up Cyclical. Purity concentrates the upside and downside symmetrically. Diversification is what lets the moat survive the driving thesis softening.
The same tech shows up in different tiers. These were the tier assignments we chewed on longest. Constellation Energy and Talen both own nuclear plants. Both have hyperscaler power purchase agreements (PPAs). Constellation converted its nuclear scarcity into 20-year fixed-output contracts across the fleet. Talen has done that for one asset, while the rest of its portfolio rides the strongest merchant power market in a generation. The plants look similar, but the economics don't. That's where the framework really helps -- separating ownership of the moat from conversion of the moat into contracted economics.
None of this is a forecast about who survives. It's not clear which of these 17 companies will emerge with structural moats intact in 2035. What we do know is that the question is worth asking now while the build-out is still going, and the answer isn't yet obvious.
