The LENS Index Just Added Three Names. None of Them Are Chips.

Three signals. One portfolio entry and two Watch List additions. That is what happened inside the LENS Index this week, and each one deserves a proper explanation.

The short version first. The AI trade is increasingly crowded. Capital has been flooding into semiconductors for the better part of a year. What the screeners keep surfacing is names that got left behind during that flood. This week, four separate screeners caught three distinct opportunities in sectors most analysts have stopped paying attention to. Two went to the Watch List. One went straight into the portfolio.

Here is the current LENS state before we get into the names.

All three names, the full reasoning behind each, and what we are watching for next are below the paywall.

The Portfolio Addition: A Company Generating 25% of the World’s Electricity Every Day

The first name enters as a CORE position at 4% allocation, with an entry reference of approximately $1,043.

Start with a number most people skip over entirely. This company generates 25% of the world’s electricity every single day. Roughly 50% of US electricity. Over 7,000 gas turbines. Over 59,000 wind turbines. Over 60 nuclear plants. The installed base alone deserves a moment of attention before you get anywhere near the growth story.

GE Vernova Inc (NYSE:GEV) is not a bet on the AI data center boom. That is the misconception CEO Scott Strazik called out explicitly at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in May. Only 20% to 25% of GEV’s backlog is data center related. The other 75% to 80% is economic growth, national security, decarbonization, and the global industrialization of places like Vietnam, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil. In Strazik’s own framing, this period is most analogous to 1945 after World War II in terms of the structural need for incremental electricity. Not a three-to-five-year cycle. A permanent reconfiguration of how the world generates and moves power.

The Q1 2026 numbers make the thesis concrete. GEV booked $18.3 billion in orders in the quarter, a 71% increase year-over-year, with a book-to-bill ratio of approximately 2x. Equipment orders more than doubled. Total backlog grew to $163 billion from $116 billion at the spin in April 2024, with the equipment backlog expanding 80%.

The part the market is consistently underpricing sits in the Electrification segment. In Q1 2026, GEV’s data center orders in electrification alone exceeded all of 2025. Not a 50% increase. Not a doubling. More in one quarter than the entire prior year, driven by substations, HVDC systems, switchgear, and transformers. The electrification backlog now sits at $42 billion and is on track to reach $60 billion by end of 2027. The serviceable addressable market is approximately $300 billion based on products the company sells today. Revenue in 2028 is guided to $20 billion for electrification alone. That 15x gap between current revenue and addressable market is where the growth story lives for the next decade.

The services business is what most coverage still misses entirely. GEV carries $87 billion in services backlog generating approximately $20 billion in services revenue by 2027. Because nearly all of the new equipment being installed is baseload power running 365 days a year, the annuity stream being created is structurally more valuable than anything in GEV’s prior history. Strazik made the point directly: as the baseload installed base doubles from 200 gigawatts to 400 gigawatts by the mid-2030s, the services business compounds with it, essentially automatically.

Pricing is equally favorable. New orders in the first half of 2026 are priced 10 to 20 percentage points higher than orders placed in Q4 2025 on a dollar-per-kilowatt basis. That is not noise. That is structural pricing power in a market where GEV’s heavy-duty gas turbines face no credible near-term substitute for baseload generation. Free cash flow guidance for 2026 was raised to $6.5 billion to $7.5 billion, up from the prior guide of $5 billion to $5.5 billion. The balance sheet holds $10 billion in cash. The company has repurchased approximately $4.6 billion in stock over the last five to six quarters while simultaneously investing $11 billion in R&D and capital expenditure over four years.

GEV entry parameters. Tier: CORE. Allocation: 4%. Entry reference: $1,042.60 (Jul 13 close). Twelve-month target: $1,400, assuming continued data center order momentum and electrification backlog execution. Hard stop: $730, roughly 30% below entry. Thesis break: a sustained multi-quarter decline in data center or AI power orders, or a broad reversal in hyperscaler capex that does not currently appear in any public guidance from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta.

Watch List Addition 1: The Travel Company AI Was Supposed to Kill

Expedia Group Inc (NASDAQ:EXPE) lands on the Watch List from the Estimate Revision screener, which requires both positive EPS and revenue surprises, quarterly earnings growth above 15%, and sales growth above 10%. The dominant narrative is simple and widely held. AI travel summaries and Google will make online travel agencies obsolete. The counter-narrative is more specific. Expedia has corporate travel contracts, deep hotel inventory integrations, and a loyalty base running in the hundreds of millions. A Google AI travel summary does not fulfill a corporate booking with policy compliance, duty-of-care tracking, and preferred rate structures baked in. A P/E of 23.40 for a company with this screener profile is not expensive for what is functionally a high-margin marketplace business. EXPE does not enter the portfolio yet. The watch condition is a published article establishing the OTA-vs-AI narrative gap, combined with verification that consumer travel demand holds up under Warsh’s current rate path. It is ready for serious investigation, not action.

Watch List Addition 2: The Solar Company That Benefits From the Policy Everyone Says Is Killing Solar

First Solar Inc (NASDAQ:FSLR) is the most counterintuitive find across all four screeners this week. It trades at a P/E of 14.28 while passing EPS growth next year above 20%, Sales TTM above 5%, Gross Margin above 30%, Institutional Ownership above 50%, and Short Float above 5%. The narrative dragging the stock down is that the current administration is hostile to solar and therefore hostile to First Solar. This narrative is backwards. First Solar is the only major solar panel manufacturer operating at scale inside the United States. The IRA domestic content bonus provisions were written specifically for companies like this one. Tariffs on Chinese-manufactured solar panels, which cover the vast majority of imported product, are a direct competitive advantage for a US-based manufacturer, not a headwind. The backlog runs through 2030 on take-or-pay contracts. Revenue visibility is unusually high. The market is pricing FSLR as if it is a generic solar trade exposed to policy risk. It is not. The article establishing the domestic manufacturing and tariff advantage thesis is in progress. Entry will follow publication.

Disclaimer: We do not hold any positions in the above stock(s). Read our full disclaimer here.