OESX up 7 % yesterday based on additional order from Home Depot

OESX up 7 % yesterday based on additional order from Home Depot Positions: still my 840 stocks. Not selling. Warning - this is perhaps my longest post! TLDR: sixth post on Orion (OESX). Two parts. First, they raised full year guidance yesterday because Home Depot, a customer theyve served for years, just handed them a big new batch of stores. Second, the part that should make you wake up, the enormous AI data center opportunity and why Orion is going to keep winning it. Part 1, Home Depot The [press release](https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/orion-announces-major-us-retailer-122800160.html) yesterday. A longtime customer placed a follow on commitment for a new LED lighting project worth an estimated 10 to 15 million usd. Interior LED retrofits plus IoT installs, and this is the important bit, at additional locations, stores Orion has not touched before. Orion calls them a Global Fortune 50 company and one of the biggest names in retailing. Thats Home Depot. Its an open secret at this point, everyone knows its Home Depot, theyve been Orions biggest customer for years, and theyre number 48 on the Global 50. Same precise way the CEO called the data center customer a Fortune 20, which for what its worth makes me even more confident in the Microsoft read from last week. The line in the release worth reading twice is Orion saying this expansion demonstrates the confidence theyve earned with this retailer over the course of numerous projects spanning several years. Think about what that actually describes. Home Depot is one of the biggest companies in the United States, approximately 2,400 stores plus around 1,300 SRS branches, and roughly 165 billion in annual sales. Orion didnt land them in one shot. They got a foot in the door years ago, did the work, got handed more stores, did those, got handed IoT, then maintenance, then electrical contracting, and now theyre being handed locations they have never been in before. Slowly but surely they won over the entire company. And Home Depot is still growing the footprint, which is the part nobody prices in. Fiscal 2026 guidance is approximately 15 new stores plus 40 to 50 new SRS branches, with capex running at about 2.5% of sales, so roughly 4 billion a year, a good chunk of it going into store experience. Every new store is a new roof full of lights, and Orion is the vendor they already trust. On top of that, out of roughly 2,400 existing stores, yesterday tells you there are still locations Orion hasnt retrofitted. So the account isnt done, its still expanding on both ends, new builds and old stores. And heres why that matters beyond Home Depot. Its the exact same movie playing again with Microsoft, just faster. Foot in the door in June with one building. Reorder for a second building three months later. Orion has now proven, twice, with two of the biggest companies in the country, that once they get inside a customer they end up serving more of the building, then more buildings. What more could we possibly ask for? If the Home Depot playbook took years to fill out, and Microsoft is already on building two after ninety days, you can guess where this goes. And the guide is the number that matters. Orion took full year FY27 revenue from 95 to 97 million up to 100 to 102 million. Thats not the first time theyve done triple digits, they did 150.8 million in fiscal 2020 when the big Home Depot retrofit wave came through, then 116.8 and 124.4 the two years after. Then it fell back to the 80s. So this is Orion on its way back to its best years. Most of the new work lands in the back half of the fiscal year, which ends March 31. Q2 steps down from Q1s 25.7 million on normal seasonality, and they still expect positive adjusted EBITDA for the year. Stock closed yesterday at 26.91, up 6.41% on the day, though at the peak it was up 15% to 29.09 before giving some back. Market cap now around 110 million. Part 2, the data centers, and how big this actually gets Quick recap. Orion makes the MPHL2, an LED fixture built specifically for hyperscale AI data centers, made in Wisconsin. First multimillion dollar order from a hyperscaler in June, a second one for a second building last week. I laid out in [post 5](https://www.reddit.com/r/pennystocks/s/aV1qIyJHMZ) why it cannot be any other company on earth than Microsoft. Fortune 20 global only fits three hyperscalers, Amazon at 1, Alphabet at 8, Microsoft at 18, and you say Fortune 10 if its either of the first two. Then its Wisconsin, two hours from Orions plant, and Microsoft is the only one of the three with a second building funded and in the ground there. Its a given. Ill keep Mount Pleasant short because I already covered it. Microsoft has 15 more data centers approved on that one campus, Orion has the first two buildings, and Im confident Orion gets most if not all of the remaining 15. Thats potentially 45 to 60 million from a single site. What I want to do here is look at when Orion won, because that tells you which other buildings are in play right now. Go back and look at the timeline. Orion introduced the MPHL2 in mid May. The first order came June 8, a few weeks later, for a single location, and it was a deployment, meaning product shipping, not a design study. Now think about what Microsoft had going in Wisconsin at that moment. Building 1 in Mount Pleasant had gone live in April and was formally declared complete June 23. Building 2 was already under construction. So Orion sold into a campus that was mid build, with a product that had existed for a month, and got a reorder three months later. That tells you two things. One, lighting gets decided late. Its one of the last things in, so a data center that finishes in 2027 or 2028 is deciding its lighting in 2026 or 2027, meaning right about now. Two, Orion can get into a spec that was almost certainly written before their product existed. A campus designed in 2024 had a lighting plan, and Orion either got added to it or replaced whoever was in it, within weeks. And the June release even says the product was developed with Orions channel partners, meaning the electrical distributors and contractors that build these things. Those partners dont work for one hyperscaler, they work for all of them. If you cannot put two and two together by this point, that Orion will continue to get massive orders, then I cant help you. Ill admit this next part is more speculation. But when you win over Microsoft in such a convincing manner, you can easily win over the other hyperscalers. So who else is building within delivery range of Manitowoc, and when do their lighting decisions land? The big one is right down the road. OpenAI, Oracle and Vantage are building the Stargate campus in Port Washington, Wisconsin, about an hour from Orions plant. 15 billion dollars, four data centers, close to a gigawatt, 672 acres. Groundbreaking was December, the first 8 billion dollar phase is due 2028, and their own filings say 3,500 workers on site this year and 5,000 next year. The interior fit out on those buildings, which is when lighting goes in, is 2027. Thats the biggest single construction project in Wisconsin history and as far as I know its lighting is still open. Then Meta in Beaver Dam, also about an hour away. 1 billion, 700,000 square feet, AI optimized, broke ground last November, online 2027. If lighting goes in late, Meta is deciding on Beaver Dam lighting right now or in the next couple of quarters. Then the rest of the neighborhood. Microsoft broke ground on a new data center in La Porte, Indiana this summer. Amazon has its 11 billion dollar New Carlisle, Indiana campus with multiple buildings going up in phases. QTS announced a hyperscale campus in Dane County, Wisconsin. Meta has DeKalb, Illinois. Apple is expanding in Waukee, Iowa. Google announced its first Minnesota data center, and Google and Amazon just announced 25 billion between them in Missouri. And Microsoft, on top of the 15 approved buildings, is buying another 1,030 acres in Mount Pleasant. Do I know if Google or Amazon have already picked a lighting vendor for any of those? No. I searched, and nobody discloses that, it lives inside construction subcontracts. What I can tell you is that data center lighting has been dominated by a handful of big established groups, mostly European, and Orion just took two buildings off one of them at the biggest AI campus in the country. The one Wisconsin based competitor, sitting right next to Mount Pleasant, went through a financial restructuring this year that the trade press called an implosion. So the local field just cleared out at the exact moment the local buildout went vertical. And Orion is not regional, to be clear. This is where the supply chain comes back in. Orion builds the whole fixture domestically, ground up, on a chain theyve spent years putting together in Wisconsin, and that lets them quote a US made part, customize it to the floor plan and ship it anywhere in the country on a timeline they control. No parts stuck on a boat from Asia, no customs delay, no surprise tariff repricing the job halfway through. It also happens to be exactly what Washington wants right now. The administrations AI Action Plan and America First push are explicit that this infrastructure gets built with American manufacturing, not adversarial technology, and the data center executive order calls the whole buildout a golden age for American industry. A hyperscaler that wants a made in America story on its parts list gets one from Orion without trying. They already run national retail rollouts across the entire US for Home Depot, so the logistics are proven. The Wisconsin base is a cost and lead time edge, not a range limit. So its Midwest proximity where the building boom is loudest, plus a domestic supply chain that can serve all fifty states, plus a product that ticks the policy box. Best of all worlds. Now put a number on it. Just the projects above, within a few hours of Manitowoc, are something like 25 to 30 hyperscale buildings finishing between 2027 and 2029, before you count the 15 more at Mount Pleasant. At 3 to 4 million a building thats 75 to 120 million sitting inside a drive from the factory, on top of the 45 to 60 million from Microsoft alone. Orion did 86 million in revenue last year. And thats the neighborhood, not the country, where there are about 4,000 data centers already and over 570 more hyperscale projects planned adding 90 gigawatts. As Ive said before, they dont need to capture the entire market, just a rounding error of it, and theyve already won twice from the biggest buyer in it while sitting in the exact region everyone else is now pouring concrete. Put the two halves together. The base business just guided back toward its best years on Home Depot, and sitting on top is a data center product that has Microsoft coming back for seconds, in the middle of the fastest growing data center region in the country. Im staying put. Small disclaimer, for the other actors in the data center space, I researched to the best of my ability and presented what I found. If Im wrong on any of it, please point it out! Not investment advice. As with all stocks, do your own work and research before going in.