Under the wave of the "storage super cycle", this intelligent toilet giant Toto has exploded in popularity! Toto accurately secured NAND production capacity and its stock price saw a record daily increase.

Due to the booming wave of global AI data center construction, the demand for DRAM/NAND storage chips is extremely strong - major data centers under construction or about to be built have an almost "endless" demand for storage chips, driving this high-quality Japanese manufacturer of intelligent toilet products, Toto Corporation (also known as "ToTo"), to announce stronger-than-expected performance and immediately announce plans to increase its actual investment in its chip components business. After announcing strong performance and significantly expanding its chip business investment, 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 public performance statement released on Thursday, Toto Corporation will accelerate its spending on the research and production capacity of its exclusive customized electrostatic chuck; electrostatic chucks are commonly used in the manufacturing of NAND series storage chips and are an indispensable link in NAND production. The globally renowned bathroom product manufacturer also announced that, benefiting from the strong demand for electrostatic chucks and AD components, its net sales for the fiscal year ending in March reached as high as 67.4 billion yen (4.29 billion US dollars), an increase of 34% from the previous year, exceeding the expectations of almost all analysts. Against the backdrop of the so-called "storage chip super cycle" driven by the unprecedented AI infrastructure frenzy, the electrostatic chuck is arguably the most core and market-revalued storage-related product line, particularly benefiting from the surge in demand for NAND storage chips driven by AI data center construction. No matter how powerful the GPU/TPU computing power is, without HBM providing bandwidth expansion, without enterprise-grade NAND and large-capacity HDD to handle training checkpoints, vector databases, and inference data lakes, the utilization and efficiency of the entire AI computing power infrastructure cluster cannot be maximized; therefore, global capital markets are willing to give higher valuations to the DRAM/NAND storage chain because it benefits from the "triple leverage of volume increase, price increase, and long-term supply constraints", rather than just a single growth in shipments. At the time of this Toto rally, Toto is facing pressure from Palliser Capital, a UK-based activist hedge fund demanding shareholder returns. The well-known investment fund recently invested in the company and is lobbying for increased publicity and investment in its chip components business. Palliser stated that Toto is missing out on the upward potential brought by the storage super cycle driven by the AI frenzy, and should increase market awareness of its electrostatic chuck business. As shown in the chart above, Toto's share price has surged recently due to plans to expand its chip components business. In its latest statement, Toto announced plans to invest approximately 30 billion yen by the 2028 fiscal year to significantly increase the production capacity of three ceramic factories. The Japanese company based in Fukuoka stated in its performance demonstration material that it expects an increase in demand for its chuck business as technology companies increase their investments in AI computing infrastructure. Given the company's strong performance, senior analyst Daisuke Fukushima from Nomura Securities has significantly raised Toto's 12-month stock price target from 4570 yen to 5430 yen, citing the strong performance of its ceramic business as the core reason. As another typical sign of the prosperity of storage chip demand, Tokyo Electron Ltd., Japan's largest chip equipment manufacturer and also a core equipment supplier for SK Hynix and TSMC, predicted better-than-expected sales for the first half of the year when it released its performance on Thursday. The stock rose by 8.6% during trading on Friday, reaching a new all-time high in the Tokyo market. Tokyo Electron's CEO, Toshiki Kawai, stated earlier this week that NAND output spending may increase further, and he has not yet included this upward trend in the company's earnings growth forecast. He told analysts at a briefing, "We want to make sure we capture this demand." Cloud computing service providers need to continuously purchase more expensive enterprise-grade solid-state drives (eSSD) and other advanced types of NAND storage devices, including MLC and QLC, to support massive AI training/inference workloads, as well as memory chips for quick access to data. The AI frenzy is heating up the toilet giant! Toto's electrostatic chuck precisely positions NAND capacity The core logic behind Toto's recent stock price surge is not the generalized pull of "logic chips, GPUs, or general semiconductors" with strong demand, but its advanced ceramic products directly benefiting from the surge in demand for NAND storage chips under the AI wave. The most revalued asset in Toto's advanced ceramic business is the electrostatic chuck (ESC), which is an indispensable link in the NAND manufacturing industry. 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: electrostatic chucks are responsible for stabilizing the wafer during etching, deposition, and other high-precision processes, while maintaining temperature uniformity, cleanliness, and mechanical stability. As NAND scales up to 200 layers, 300 layers, or even higher, the requirements for the thermal stability, insulation, flatness, and anti-pollution capability of chuck materials in deep hole etching, high aspect ratio structures, and low temperature/ultra-low temperature etching have significantly increased. An investment material from Palliser also emphasizes that the increase in production of NAND with over 200 layers is driving the adoption of low temperature etching and boosting TOTO ESC demand. The market has traditionally viewed Toto Corporation as an advanced intelligent bathroom/residential equipment company, but the activist investor Palliser is calling it a severely undervalued and long-overlooked "storage super cycle" winner - revalued by the market based on the scarce position of its advanced ceramics in the NAND storage chip manufacturing chain. Unlike AI GPUs from NVIDIA, as well as AI ASICs from Google/Broadcom/MediaTek, HBM, and other AI computing chips, Toto is more like a hidden beneficiary of the surge in demand for storage chip manufacturing equipment consumables/key 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 raging conflict in the Middle East cannot suppress the "AI bull market" narrative! AI completely ignites the "storage super cycle", from HBM to NAND experiencing comprehensive shortage The record cash that the global AI data center construction frenzy has brought for the almost endless demand for storage chips has led to the latest performance data from the world's largest DRAM/NAND storage chip supplier, Samsung Electronics Co., showing that the semiconductor manufacturing division of this tech giant has significantly exceeded expectations, with profits surging by a crazy 48 times. The latest performance data from the leading SSD manufacturer, SanDisk, shows a revenue of 5.95 billion USD in the third quarter, a staggering 97% year-on-year increase, far surpassing analysts' expectations of 4.7 billion USD. Adjusted earnings per share were 23.41 USD, nearly 1.6 times the analysts' expected 14.54 USD, and the company's data center business revenue more than tripled year-on-year, reaching 1.47 billion USD in a single quarter. A research report recently released by the Melius analyst team led by star analyst Ben Reitzes suggested that the AI frenzy 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, where supply and demand and price trends far exceed the historical peak during the 2018 cloud computing boom. With the rapid launch of tools like Claude Cowork from Anthropic, and self-executing super AI agents like OpenClaw in 2026, the AI intelligent agent wave quickly swept the globe, suggesting that AI computing architectures are shifting from GPUs core to AI full stack systems driven by "AI intelligent agents"; in this narrative shift, data center CPUs and storage chips may be the biggest beneficiaries. In other words, the AI computing bull market is further spreading from "AI chip computing systems" to central processors and "data storage foundations". GPUs generate intelligence, HBM/DRAM provides high-speed bandwidth, enterprise-grade NAND/eSSD handles hot data and caches, while HDD is responsible for long-term retention of cold/medium data in massive volumes. As the benchmark of the South Korean stock market, the KOSPI Composite Index with high weights from Samsung and SK Hynix hit a historical high under the heavy pressure of deteriorating geopolitical situations, and the stock market in Taiwan, China also reached new highs driven by Taiwan Semiconductor, known as the "king of chip foundries". The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, also known as the "chip stock barometer", has seen a record 18 consecutive trading days of gains, while the S&P 500 index has risen for four consecutive weeks, making investors increasingly confident in the "AI computing investment theme" being able to overshadow all the noise in the stock market, especially related to geopolitical issues in the Middle East. Whether it's the incredibly large TPU AI computing clusters led by Google, or massive NVIDIA AI GPU computing clusters, they all rely on HBM storage systems integrated with AI chips, and in addition to HBM, tech giants like Google and OpenAI are accelerating the construction or expansion of new AI data centers, requiring widespread purchases of server-grade DDR5 memory and enterprise-level high-performance SSD/HDD storage solutions. From a hardware theory perspective, AI computing is not only limited by computing power but also by "data storage and handling capabilities". Whether it's an NVIDIA GPU or a TPU computing system, what truly determines the efficiency of large model training and inference is not just the number of Tensor Cores/matrix units, but the bandwidth per second that feeds weights, KV cache, activation values, and intermediate tensors into the computing core. AI computing clusters that handle massive training and inference workloads need not only GPUs but also HBM for high-bandwidth near-edge memory, DDR5/LPDDR5 for system memory, NAND/eSSD for data lakes and inference caches, as storage has become the bottleneck of AI factories' throughput. Interestingly, market investment logic is transitioning from solely "HBM premiums" to address the traditional shortage of DRAM/NAND supplies. The profitability of traditional DRAM may even begin to outperform that of HBM - as DDR5, LPDDR5, enterprise SSD, and NAND prices continue to soar, storage chip manufacturers may not be willing to invest all incremental capital expenses in advanced and ultra-complex HBM with difficulties in expanding yield, but will reassess the return on investment among HBM, traditional DRAM, NAND, and advanced packaging. In other words, while HBM is still a star asset for AI training/massive inference workloads, the greater surprise currently comes from the "entire storage pool being in shortage", especially when high-performance DRAM and eSSD are being massively used for AI inference workloads, their demand and price hikes may be far from over.