Kioxia, the chip manufacturer based in Kitakami (Japan), held a ceremony at its factory today to mark the recovery of its business and the meteoric rise of its share price, driven by the boom in AI investment.
The company's share price has risen sevenfold so far in 2026, and it currently has a market capitalisation of over $250,000 million, surpassing even Toyota Motor.
Kioxia, formerly known as Toshiba Memory, was the company that invented NAND flash memory in the 1980s, the price of which had plummeted until 2024. With the rise of AI and the demand for DRAM memory chips, demand for NAND memory has now skyrocketed, and Kioxia accounts for virtually all of that demand. According to the Reuters report, Kioxia is two to four years ahead of its rivals in terms of NAND memory performance and energy consumption.
Japan intends to replicate the economic miracle of the last century in this new era of AI, and last March, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi's government announced a target to increase sales of domestically produced chips fivefold by 2040.