The strange Japanese companies minting money from AI
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Business | Flush with cash<br>The strange Japanese companies minting money from AI<br>What the creator of MSG and the world’s biggest toilet-maker have in common<br>Share
Unclogging the AI supply chainPhotograph: Getty Images
May 14th 2026|Tokyo|3 min read
Ajinomoto has spent well over a century supplying monosodium glutamate (MSG), a chemical that gives food an umami kick. Now another of the Japanese seasoning giant’s products is whetting investors’ appetites. Ajinomoto Build-up Film (ABF) is a material used to insulate artificial-intelligence processors from circuit boards. It was originally made from by-products of MSG manufacturing. Ajinomoto controls more than 95% of the market. Booming demand for AI chips has made the film scarce, pushing Ajinomoto’s share price up by 65% since the start of the year, around three times the gain in Japan’s benchmark Nikkei index.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Flush with cash”
From the May 16th 2026 edition<br>Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents<br>⇒Explore the edition
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