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% higher on 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% surge on Thursday came as chip-related shares gained across Asia.
The tech rally followed comments from Jensen Huang, head of Nvidia, the US 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 the 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.” — AFP
