Under the wave of the "storage super cycle", this smart toilet giant Toto has exploded! Toto accurately secured NAND production capacity, with the stock price achieving a record single-day increase.

Due to the booming global trend of AI data center construction, the demand for DRAM/NAND storage chips is incredibly strongmajor data centers that are being built or about to begin construction have almost "endless" demand for storage chips, driving the Japanese high-quality bathroom product manufacturer Toto Corporation (also known as "Toto") focused on smart toilet product line to announce strong performance growth beyond expectations, and immediately announced plans to increase the actual investment scale in its chip component business; following the announcement of strong performance and significant expansion of chip business investment scale, its stock price surged violently by over 18% in the Tokyo stock market, setting a record for the largest increase in the company's stock price history. According to a publicly released performance statement on Thursday, Toto Corporation plans to accelerate spending on the research and production capacity of its exclusive customized electrostatic chuck; electrostatic chucks are commonly used in NAND series storage chip manufacturing and are an essential part of NAND products. The globally renowned bathroom product manufacturer also announced that, benefiting from the strong demand for electrostatic chucks and AD components, its net sales revenue for the fiscal year ending in March reached a staggering 67.4 billion yen (approximately $4.29 billion), an increase of 34% from the previous year, surpassing almost all analysts' expectations. In this unprecedented frenzy of AI infrastructure driven by what is called the "storage chip super cycle", the electrostatic chuck can be said to be the most core and market-revalued product line related to storage chips, especially benefiting from the sharp increase in demand for NAND storage chips driven by AI data center construction. No matter how strong GPU/TPU computing power is, without HBM providing bandwidth multiple, without enterprise-grade NAND and large-capacity HDD to support training checkpoints, vector databases, and inference data lakes, the utilization and efficiency of the entire AI computing infrastructure cluster cannot be improved; hence, global capital markets are willing to give higher valuations to the DRAM/NAND storage chain, because it benefits from the triple leverage of "increased volume, increased price, and long-term supply constraints", rather than just single shipment growth. At the time of the surge in Toto's stock price, Toto is facing shareholder return pressure from the UK activist investment fund Palliser Capital; the well-known investment fund recently acquired shares in the company and is lobbying for increased promotion and investment in its chip component business. Palliser stated that Toto is missing out on the upward potential brought by the storage super cycle driven by the AI boom and should increase the market's awareness of its electrostatic chuck business. As shown in the above chart, Toto's recent stock price surged due to its plans to expand its chip component business. In its latest statement, Toto stated that it plans to invest approximately 30 billion yen by the fiscal year 2028 to significantly increase the production capacity of its three ceramic factories. The Japanese company based in Fukuoka stated in its performance presentation materials that it expects its chuck business demand to increase as technology companies allocate more funds to AI computing infrastructure. Given the strong performance of the company, senior analyst Daisuke Fukushima from Nomura Securities significantly raised Toto's 12-month stock price target from 4,570 yen to 5,430 yen, with the core reason being the strong performance of its ceramic business. As another typical sign of booming demand for storage chips, Tokyo Electron Ltd., the largest chip equipment manufacturer in Japan and also a core supplier for SK Hynix and TSMC, predicted during its earnings release on Thursday that its sales for the first half of the year will significantly outperform market expectations. The stock rose by 8.6% in Tokyo trading on Friday, reaching a new all-time high. Tokyo Electron's CEO Toshiki Kawai mentioned earlier this week that NAND production capacity expenditures may further increase, and he has not yet included this upside in the company's growth forecasts. He told analysts at a briefing, "We are very eager to ensure we capture this demand." Cloud computing service providers need to continually purchase increasingly expensive enterprise-grade solid-state drives (eSSD) and other types of advanced NAND storage devices, including MLC and QLC, to support massive AI training/inference workloads, as well as memory chips for fast data access. The AI boom has spread to the toilet giant! Toto's electrostatic chuck precisely captures NAND capacity The core logic behind the recent surge in Toto's stock price is not the generalized pull of "logic chips, GPUs, or general semiconductors" with strong demand, but its advanced ceramic products benefiting directly from the soaring demand for NAND storage chips in the AI wave. The most market-revalued asset of Toto is the electrostatic chuck (ESC) in its advanced ceramic business, which is an indispensable link in the NAND manufacturing industry chain. From an engineering perspective, the importance of Toto's ESC products lies in their critical role in the key process of 3D NAND wafer manufacturing: the electrostatic chuck is responsible for stably adsorbing wafers during etching, deposition, and other high-precision processes, while maintaining temperature uniformity, cleanliness, and mechanical stability. As NAND evolves from hundreds of layers to over 200 layers, 300 layers, or even higher layers, the requirements for the thermal stability, insulation, flatness, and pollution resistance of chuck materials in deep hole etching, high aspect ratio structures, low temperature/ultra-low temperature etching have significantly increased. A Palliser investment material also emphasizes that the increase in production of NAND layers above 200 is driving the adoption of low-temperature etching, driving the demand for TOTO ESC. The market previously viewed Toto Corporation as an advanced intelligent bathroom/home equipment company, but the aggressive investor Palliser now calls it the severely undervalued and long-neglected "storage super cycle" big winnerrevalued by the market for its rare process in the NAND storage chip manufacturing industry chain with advanced ceramics. Unlike NVIDIA AI GPUs and Google/Broadcom/MediaTek AI ASICs, HBM, and other direct computing chip chains, Toto is more like a hidden beneficiary of the booming demand for storage chip manufacturing equipment consumables/critical components driven by the AI wave. The world's largest cloud computing service providers, such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, urgently need more SSDs and advanced NAND to support AI training data, inference logs, vector databases, multimodal content, and enterprise data storage. The AI boom has ignited a "storage super cycle", shifting from HBM to NAND facing comprehensive shortages As the unprecedented global trend of AI data center construction brings record cash to the almost endless demand for storage chips, the latest performance data from Samsung Electronics Co., the world's largest scale DRAM/NAND storage chip supplier, shows that the semiconductor manufacturing department of this tech giant has exceeded expectations, with profits soaring a whopping 48 times. The latest performance data from leading SSD storage product leader SanDisk shows third-quarter revenue of $5.95 billion, a staggering 97% year-on-year increase, far exceeding analysts' expectations of $4.7 billion. Adjusted earnings per share of $23.41, almost 1.6 times analysts' expected $14.54, with the company's data center business revenue more than tripling year-on-year, reaching a single quarter of $1.47 billion. A research report recently released by analyst team led by star analyst Ben Reitzes at Melius stated that the AI wave will continue to drive strong growth in storage chip demand until the end of this decade (2030). According to market research firm Counterpoint Research, the storage market has entered a "super bull market" or "super cycle" phase, with current supply-demand and price trends far exceeding the historic highs of the cloud computing boom in 2018. With the rapid development of AI agents such as Claude Cowork from Anthropic, and task-executing super AI agents like OpenClaw, exploding in 2026, this wave of AI intelligent agents is quickly sweeping the globe, and AI computing architecture bottlenecks are shifting from GPUs focused on matrix multiplication to "AI intelligent agent-driven AI full-stack systems", with data center CPUs and storage chips possibly being the biggest winners in this shift of the AI narrative. In other words, the AI computing bull market is further spreading to include central processors and "data storage bases" from "AI chip computing systems". GPUs generate intelligence, HBM/DRAM provides high-speed multiples, enterprise-grade NAND/eSSD provides hot data and cache, and HDD provides long-term storage of massive amounts of cold/warm data. With the benchmark of the Korean stock marketKOSPI South Korea Composite Index heavily weighted by Samsung and SK Hynix reaching historic highs under the pressure of deteriorating geopolitical situations, and with the weight stock TSMC, known as the "chip foundry king", driving the Taiwanese stock market to record highs, along with the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, known as the "chip stock bellwether", seeing a record 18 consecutive trading day rise, investors are becoming increasingly convinced that the "AI computing investment theme" can overwhelm all noise in the stock market, especially related to geopolitical noise. Whether it's the immensely vast TPU AI computing cluster led by Google, or the massive NVIDIA AI GPU computing cluster, they both require fully integrated HBM storage systems carrying AI chips. In addition to HBM, tech giants like Google and OpenAI accelerating new builds or expansions of AI data centers also need to purchase server-grade DDR5 storage and enterprise-grade high-performance SSDs/HDDs as storage solutions. From a fundamental hardware theory perspective, AI computing is not only limited by computing power, but also by "data storage and transportation capabilities". Whether it's an NVIDIA GPU or TPU computing system, what truly determines the efficiency of large-scale model training and inference is not just the number of Tensor Cores/matrix units, but the bandwidth per second to feed weights, KV cache, activation values, and intermediate tensors into the computing cores. The AI computing cluster handling massive training and inference workloads needs not only GPUs but also HBM for high-bandwidth near-memory, DDR5/LPDDR5 for system memory, and NAND/eSSD for data lakes and inference cache; storage has evolved from being "complementary components" to being the throughput bottleneck of the AI factory. What's more interesting is that the market investment logic is expanding from just "HBM premium" to traditional DRAM/NAND supply shortages. Traditional DRAM profit margins are even starting to exceed HBM profit marginsas DDR5, LPDDR5, enterprise SSDs, and NAND prices continue to soar, storage chip manufacturers may not be willing to invest all incremental capital expenditures in advanced packaging that is extremely complex, costly, and difficult to expand like HBM, but will reassess the return on capital between HBM, traditional DRAM, NAND, and advanced packaging. In other words, while HBM is still the star asset for AI training/massive inference workloads, the current larger upside comes from the "entire storage pool being in short supply", especially high-performance DRAM and eSSD also being massively used for AI inference workloads, with their demand and price increases possibly far from over.