The global boom in artificial intelligence (AI) has turned an obscure 139-year-old Japanese company into a stock market star. Fujikura, which makes wire cabling for data centers, is the best performer on the 225-issue Nikkei stock average index, with its shares surging more than 400% this year. It will join the MSCI global standard indexes on Nov. 25 as the sole addition from Japan while eight other companies from the country will be removed. The firm is a classic "picks and shovels" investment as tech companies and utilities pour money into building out the necessary infrastructure to support AI. Construction of the data centers, electricity supplies and communications networks needed for AI will require at least 1 trillion of spending, according to an analysis by Bloomberg News. The rapid growth of the industry has surprised Fujikura itself.

Around 2014, researchers working on AI realized that GPUs worked better for training AI than other chips. While the more-common computer processing units, or CPUs, are optimized to handle a small number of highly complicated tasks, GPUs are better at doing the math for many simple calculations at the same time. Because training AI requires making many connections between billions of different words or images, GPUs worked well. Many of the major AI breakthroughs that helped set the foundation for the large language models at the center of today's AI revolution were made by running AI algorithms on Nvidia GPUs.