AI chip boom lifts Toto and Ajinomoto

Two Japanese companies best known for bathrooms and soup stock have become unlikely bellwethers for the AI hardware boom—because the real choke points in modern computing are not always GPUs, but the obscure materials and process equipment that make chips manufacturable at scale.

Business Insider reports that Toto, the maker of high-end bidet toilets, has attracted activist investor interest for a decidedly unglamorous product: electrostatic chucks used in semiconductor manufacturing, particularly for NAND flash memory production. Electrostatic chucks are the workholding components that clamp wafers during plasma etch, deposition, and related steps; they must tolerate high temperatures, aggressive chemistries, and tight flatness requirements while maintaining uniform clamping and thermal control. When memory demand rises—currently boosted by AI workloads that are memory-hungry rather than merely compute-hungry—so does the value of anything that keeps wafer tools running.

The same article highlights Ajinomoto, a food giant synonymous with MSG and umami seasonings, as another beneficiary. Ajinomoto produces an insulating material used in advanced semiconductor packaging. Packaging is where the industry’s marketing slogans (“chiplets,” “2.5D,” “HBM”) collide with physics: pushing bandwidth and power density upward forces new dielectric films, adhesives, and substrates that can survive fine-pitch interconnects, high temperatures, and mechanical stress without delamination or signal loss. AI demand is increasingly a packaging and materials story.

Ajinomoto’s earnings show that “electronic materials” can quietly outgrow the headline business. For the nine months ended December, the company reported net profit up 8.9% and operating profit up 5.6% year-on-year, partly attributed to the segment that includes those semiconductor materials, according to the company’s own statement cited by Business Insider.

Not every adjacent supplier gets a free ride. The report notes Daikin—globally an air-conditioner brand—supplies high-purity chemical materials for semiconductor manufacturing, but still trimmed its outlook amid uncertainty over US tariffs and uneven demand recovery. That is the other side of supply-chain leverage: when governments treat trade policy as a mood swing, capital-intensive process industries become collateral damage, regardless of how “strategic” their fluorochemicals or polymers are.

The AI boom is minting winners in the least Silicon Valley way imaginable: via electrostatic ceramics, dielectric films, and chemical purity—components that don’t trend on social media, but determine yields, uptime, and ultimately whether the datacenter buildout is constrained by physics or by procurement paperwork.