AI stock surge an unlikely boon for Japan toilet maker

The demo Toto toilet is seen on January 8, 2016 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada on January 8, 2016. (AFP PHOTO/ROB LEVER)

It’s not just Nvidia and other heavyweights of the AI stocks boom who are feeling flush.

Shares in Japanese toilet maker Toto, known for its high-tech bidet thrones, closed nearly 10 per cent higher Thursday thanks to the company’s unlikely link to the semiconductor supply chain.

Toto’s luxury toilets with warm seats and precision spray technology are hugely popular in Japan, and increasingly abroad.

But the firm also uses its know-how in ceramics to mass produce components used in the complicated process of manufacturing the microchips that power artificial intelligence systems as well as myriad other electronic products.

These components include so-called “electrostatic chucks”, which hold silicon wafers firmly in place while they are etched with miniscule transistors.

Toto’s 9.7 per cent surge on Thursday came as chip-related shares gained across Asia.

The tech rally followed comments from Jensen Huang, head of Nvidia, the U.S. chip titan that has become the world’s most valuable company on frenzied optimism around AI’s potential.

Huang said at the World Economic Forum that today’s AI boom “has started the largest infrastructure buildout in human history”.

“We’re now a few hundred billion dollars into it... there are trillions of dollars of infrastructure that needs to be built out” in fields including energy, cloud computing and electronics, he said.

Electric bidet toilets are the norm in Japan, where more than 80 per cent of homes have one.

Sales are also surging abroad, especially in the United States, led by A-list bidet fans such as Drake, the Kardashians and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“As demand for generative AI rises, demand for the data centres required to store the necessary data for this technology will increase. At the same time, we expect demand for Toto’s electrostatic chucks to increase,” Toto says.