How toilet maker Toto turned its ceramics know-how into an AI play

Chipmaking materials are now its cash cow, but stock market remains unimpressed

Toto manufactures three core products for chipmaking equipment: electrostatic chucks, upper left, aerosol deposition components, lower left, and durable structural parts used in equipment for producing large LCD panels. (Toto)

TOKYO -- Japan's Toto may be best known for churning out toilets, bathtubs and kitchens, but its earnings are now anchored by a very different kind of product: high-precision ceramic components used in the kind of semiconductor manufacturing equipment crucial to sustaining the artificial intelligence boom.