AI's Real Winners: Unseen Supply Chain Players Cash In

The Japanese toilet manufacturer Toto has posted a 54 per cent share price gain over the past year, but not from selling lavatories. Its real money comes from electrostatic chucks for memory chip production. When activist investor Palliser Capital disclosed a stake last month, calling Toto "the most undervalued and overlooked AI memory beneficiary", the market responded with a 5 per cent single-day jump.

Whilst the investment world fixates on Nvidia's quarterly guidance and whether the Magnificent Seven can sustain their astronomical valuations, a cluster of decidedly unglamorous companies have positioned themselves at critical junctures in the semiconductor supply chain. An MSG producer, a paint seller, and a 19th-century printing firm are quietly banking genuine revenue from the AI infrastructure buildout—no hype required.

The monopolist hiding in your spice cabinet

Ajinomoto, the Japanese company whose name graces MSG packets across Asian supermarkets, controls more than 95 per cent of the global market for Ajinomoto build-up film (ABF). In the 1990s, researchers at the firm discovered that a by-product from their amino acid production process functioned as an exceptionally effective electrical insulator. They developed it into ABF, a material that sits between advanced processors, preventing the copper wiring in CPUs and GPUs from short-circuiting.

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Every chip deployed in modern data centres relies on this material, according to company statements. Ajinomoto has already spent ¥25 billion expanding production facilities outside Tokyo over the past two years. President Shigeo Nakamuro, whose entire career has been in the electronics division rather than flavourings, has committed to matching that investment by 2030.

The company is targeting a 50 per cent production capacity increase and forecasting annual electronics division growth exceeding 10 per cent through the decade. The stock has climbed 31 per cent year to date.

Ajinomoto's near-monopoly has become a strategic vulnerability in the eyes of US policymakers, with a Berkeley-based startup backed partly through CHIPS Act funding attempting to develop a competing material.

Data centres run hot, paint companies profit

Sherwin-Williams has been selling paint for 150 years. The company operates nearly 5,000 retail locations across the United States and posted record full-year sales and earnings per share in its fourth quarter results. Chief executive Heidi Petz guided 2026 earnings to between $11.50 and $11.90 per share.

None of that screams artificial intelligence. But within the industrial division sits a business producing thermal coatings for data centre flooring. AI data centres generate substantially more heat than conventional facilities—the hardware is denser, power consumption higher, and fire safety requirements more stringent.

Sherwin-Williams supplies the specialised coatings that address these thermal management challenges. The data centre construction surge has driven significant growth in the company's protective and marine segment. Mizuho raised its price target last month, citing what analysts described as "pricing discipline and cost execution".

When newspaper printing meets nanometre precision

Dai Nippon Printing was founded in 1876 to print books, magazines, and packaging. By any conventional assessment, this is a legacy media business. Yet printing on paper and etching semiconductor circuits share an underlying technology: lithography, the transfer of a pattern onto a surface.

DNP's 150 years of precision in this field has translated directly into manufacturing photomasks—the plates that project circuit designs onto silicon during chip production. As semiconductors shrink to ever-smaller nodes, the tolerances on these masks become extraordinarily tight. Only a handful of companies globally can meet the specifications required for frontier chips.

In 2024, the firm was selected as a subcontractor for Rapidus, Japan's state-backed chipmaker targeting mass production by 2027. DNP's role involves developing and supplying the photomasks Rapidus needs. Earlier this year, DNP participated as a strategic investor in Rapidus' latest funding round, then released a new photomask template for the next generation of smaller chips.

Concentration risk meets infrastructure reality

The Magnificent Seven—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—now represent roughly one-third of S&P 500 market capitalisation, according to recent market data. That concentration exceeds even the peak of the dot-com bubble in 2000. JP Morgan calculated that AI-related stocks have driven approximately 75 per cent of S&P 500 returns since ChatGPT launched in late 2022.

Whether this concentration heralds disaster has consumed investors for two years, with anxiety intensifying following recent volatility around Big Tech earnings reports. Goldman Sachs forecasts AI capital expenditure rising a further 19 per cent in 2026. That spending must flow somewhere, and an increasing portion is reaching companies that supply the physical materials, coatings, and components without which the infrastructure cannot exist.

These supply chain players aren't trading on speculative demand forecasts or revenue projections tied to hypothetical AI adoption curves—they're booking actual orders and shipping tangible products.

Ajinomoto is expanding production capacity in response to signed contracts. Sherwin-Williams is selling paint to data centre developers breaking ground on real buildings. DNP is manufacturing photomasks for chips entering production lines. The AI infrastructure buildout continues regardless of whether ChatGPT subscriptions meet projections or whether autonomous vehicles arrive on schedule.

Chips must be manufactured, data centres must be constructed, and both require obscure but essential inputs from suppliers who never set out to be AI stocks. For investors seeking exposure to AI spending without the valuation risk concentrated in a handful of tech giants, the unglamorous middle of the supply chain is where the actual money is already changing hands.

More articles by Ross Williams