For all Japan’s image as a high-tech economy, there are few Japanese stocks that offer an obvious bet on the AI boom. No local equivalent of chipmaker Nvidia; no listed company that builds AI platforms at a global scale. That explains renewed interest in Kioxia, a Japanese chipmaker whose stock is up by almost half this year so far.
Kioxia has been making the same memory chips for decades. But the customer is changing. Memory storage products are increasingly being bought for data centres, shifting this market away from price-sensitive consumer electronics clients towards higher-margin infrastructure build-outs.
Until recently, the Nand flash memory chips Kioxia makes, which save information without power, were highly commoditised. Most commonly used in consumer electronics devices like smartphones, they were also interchangeable across suppliers. During 2024 alone, prices fell around 50 per cent to record lows, even amid ongoing shortages of high-end AI chips within the sector.