Kioxia briefly tops Toyota as Japan's most valuable firm on AI memory demand

Kioxia traces its origins to Toshiba's semiconductor division, which was separated off in 2017. That lineage matters here: the company now sits at the center of one of the world's largest domestic production bases for flash memory and SSDs, and its Yokkaichi plant in Mie Prefecture operates around the clock to keep pace.

The scale is unusual even by the standards of advanced manufacturing. The site spans 694,000 square meters and contains seven manufacturing buildings, with employee-only buses moving workers across the grounds. Inside, the reporter found almost no people at the core of production — instead, countless transport robots navigate the space under AI-based machine control.

What the outcome hinges on is whether the AI-related demand that lifted Kioxia's valuation in June persists. For a maker of commodity-like memory chips, a market-cap ranking that briefly placed it ahead of Toyota depends less on any single product than on that broader demand holding up — a test that will play out on the Yokkaichi floor.