Neal Freiman

I promise it's interesting.

Okay, my stock of the week is Toto, the Japanese high-end toilet maker.

Its stock just had its best day in five years, shooting up 11%.

But here's the thing.

The surge has nothing to do with increasing demand for futuristic toilets.

and everything to do with the AI infrastructure build-out.

It starts to make sense when you learn that Toto has a separate business making what's known as electrostatic chucks that are used in the chip-making process.

Toto uses its expertise in ceramics that go in its toilets to produce these chucks, and demand for chucks is expected to boom alongside AI, and AI just got a shot in the arm from none other than Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia.

At Davos this week, Huang said that the AI boom has started the largest infrastructure build-out in human history,

claiming that trillions of dollars will be spent on powering the next industrial revolution.

Those comments lifted the stocks of AI companies across the board, including the AI stock you never thought about, Toto Toilets.

You never know what's going to pop these days.

And it's not so unique for a Japanese company that makes something entirely different to also have a product, a similar product in the semiconductor supply chain.

There's an MSG seasoning inventor that makes chip insulating films, which is because it's so good about amino acids.

And there's a cosmetic firms that sells facial cleaners, but it also has a chip wafer cleaning business.

So

They've been making chips for decades in Japan.

So if you have a factory and you make something that could potentially be massaged a little bit to fit into the semiconductor supply chain, you're going to do it.

And these companies are seeing huge successes because of the AI boom.

company anymore it becomes you know an electrostatic chuck company okay but it's but just know that the demand for toilets for their japanese high-tech toilets is actually booming here toto's profits in the americas uh have grown more than eightfold over the past five years more than two in five renovating homeowners in the us are choosing to install toilets with specialty features like bidets like heating this is all the stuff that toto has really pioneered and so people are really embracing it here