Evening Briefing Asia

How AI Helped Make 2025’s Top-Performing Stock

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Nobuo Hayasaka, president of Kioxia, at the company's listing ceremony at the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Tokyo in December 2024. — Nobuo Hayasaka, president of Kioxia, at the company's listing ceremony at the Tokyo Stock Exchange in Tokyo in December 2024.
Photographer: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg

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By Stephanie Phang

December 30, 2025 at 9:00 AM UTC

That AI boom sure is something. Artificial intelligence’s insatiable appetite for data storage has helped make Japanese memory chipmaker Kioxia 2025’s best-performing stock.

Kioxia’s shares have risen around 540% year-to-date, outperforming all other members of the MSCI World Index and making it the top stock in Japan’s Topix benchmark for 2025. The NAND flash memory maker, which only debuted on the Tokyo Stock Exchange last December, counts Apple and Microsoft among its clients and is now worth about ¥5.7 trillion ($36 billion).