This one's a little weird.

This one's a little weird. There's a toilet manufacturer in Japan that's sneakily critical to the entire chips manufacturing process, and they're kind of flush with demand right now. I was in Japan last week, and a friend told me a really wild story. So it all starts back in the early 1900s with this Japanese founder who went on a trip to Europe and was really impressed by their ceramic toilets. He returned back to Japan to start a company building toilets to replace the wooden ones Japan had up until then. Ceramic is a surprisingly complex material, especially for a toilet. Toilets need to be really, really smooth for sanitary reasons, have a low error tolerance so all the piping and plumbing fits and it won't leak, and then you have to shape the whole thing first, bake it in a kiln where it shrinks 13% to exactly the right dimensions. It took them over 17,000 tests to get the first good toilet. So the company grows around the country. Then in the 1980s, Japan leads the world in the first semiconductor boom. Players like Toshiba and Hitachi emerge. At its peak, Japan is responsible for 50% of global chip production. TOTO wants to find a way in, so they establish their advanced ceramics division in 1984. Soon after, they partner with NTT Laboratories, which is Japan's Bell Labs equivalent, to make a new product called the chuck. Here's what that is. When you make a semiconductor, you blast plasma inside a vacuum chamber down onto a silicon wafer in order to etch it with the designs needed for computations. These etchings are incredibly precise, and it's important that the wafer stays in place, doesn't bend, and doesn't snap. So underneath it, you want to put a chuck to hold it still. Chucks can't use metal or have prongs because it would leave residue shavings behind, but it has to be really sturdy. So ceramic is actually perfect because it's incredibly strong, but it also can be connected via electrostatic forces, the same static energy that sticks a balloon to your hair. So TOTO builds it, releases it, and it kind of flops for 30 years until the AI boom over the last few years. As microchips become more complex and memory-focused, we've seen a totally new kind of etching and chip take off called 3D NAND. These are basically much deeper chips that stack memory cells vertically instead of horizontally. To make them work, you etch holes straight down through every layer of the chip 50x deeper than they are wide. This process makes it even more critical that the wafer stays in place and intact, so chucks become even more important. TOTO is the world's #2 chuck maker and the key supplier for the machines that etch 3D NAND chips. As a result, their advanced ceramics division is finally booming. This year, it accounted for 57% of their total operating profit, way more than the toilets. What's the opposite of a business going down the drain?