How Ajinomoto powers your laptop (and the entire semiconductor industry)

Growing up in the 1990s in India, Ajinomoto wasn’t just an ingredient; it was practically folklore. Parents whispered warnings over dinner plates. Street stalls proudly advertised “No MSG” as a badge of purity. The name evoked something vaguely chemical, definitely unnatural, and always suspect. If your chowmein tasted too good, it had to be Ajinomoto. If you felt oddly sleepy after Chinese takeout, well, everyone knew what to blame.

Many of us didn’t know much about what it actually was, only that it was bad news. MSG (monosodium glutamate) was the enemy, and Ajinomoto was the brand synonymous with it. A villain in white crystalline form, blamed for everything from palpitations to poor parenting choices.

So, imagine our disbelief when, years later, we learnt that Ajinomoto wasn’t just lurking in our schezwan fried rice, it was also inside our laptops. Like a comic book vigilante leading two lives, the company behind the much-maligned flavour booster was also a linchpin of the global tech industry.

Today, Ajinomoto manufactures a critical insulating material used in almost every high-performance chipset. From savoury soups to semiconductors, this is the improbable, fascinating story of how a seasoning giant found itself at the heart of the world’s computing power.

Birth of the fifth flavour

Our story begins not in a lab, but in a kitchen. In 1908, a Japanese chemistry professor named Kikunae Ikeda was savouring his wife’s seaweed soup when he noticed something odd.

The flavour he was tasting wasn’t sweet, salty, sour, or bitter. It was something else entirely. Through methodical experimentation, Ikeda isolated the compound responsible – glutamic acid, which was abundant in kelp.

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Determined to bottle the taste, Ikeda crystallised it, added a pinch of sodium, and thus was born monosodium glutamate, the distillation of what he dubbed umami, the fifth taste. The following year, Ikeda partnered with a businessman to commercialise the seasoning. They named their product “Aji-No-Moto”, which literally meant “the essence of taste.” And thus, Ajinomoto was born.

The rise (and fall) of a flavour icon

In the decades that followed, Ajinomoto’s MSG exploded in popularity across Asia, becoming a kitchen staple. It was marketed in elegant glass jars, gifted government support, and embraced by homemakers as modern culinary magic.

MSG soon hopped borders, from Japanese kitchens to Chinese restaurants, and eventually into American canned soups and army rations. If food tasted good, odds were, MSG was in it.

But its fall from grace came swiftly.

In 1968, a letter published in the New England Journal of Medicine described a set of vague symptoms, including headaches, numbness, and fatigue, allegedly brought on by eating at Chinese restaurants. The culprit? MSG, the letter claimed.

The media dubbed it “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome”, and soon, MSG became a health pariah. Never mind that the science behind the scare was flimsy at best. The damage was done.

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By the 1980s and ’90s, restaurants around the world proudly displayed “No Ajinomoto” or “No MSG” signs, hoping to assure nervous diners. In India, Ajinomoto’s name became almost mythically linked to the mysterious, chemical flavour lurking in Manchurian gravy and chilli paneer. Entire generations grew up believing it was toxic. Some state governments even flirted with banning it from restaurant kitchens.

Meanwhile, as public opinion turned against its best-known product, Ajinomoto, the company, was already looking elsewhere. And it kept doing what it did best – experimenting with molecules.

Accidental alchemy: Ajinomoto’s tech turn

While the world was cancelling MSG, Ajinomoto was deepening its expertise in fermentation chemistry. Manufacturing MSG, after all, is a chemical process. It involves fermenting sugars to produce glutamic acid, refining it, and crystallising it. 

Along the way, the company accrued byproducts and, by extension, new possibilities. By the 1970s, Ajinomoto had set up a functional materials division, quietly dabbling in adhesives, surfactants, and flame retardants. 

One such byproduct, a chlorinated compound left over from MSG production, caught researchers’ interest. When mixed with epoxy resins, it formed a material with high electrical resistance and excellent heat tolerance. They’d accidentally stumbled onto a polymer that was perfect for insulating electronics. 

Then came the call.

In the late ’90s, a desperate electronics manufacturer asked if that “food chemical company” could help develop an insulating film for mounting ever-shrinking, ever-faster computer chips. They gladly accepted the challenge. 

Drawing on decades of molecular mastery, Ajinomoto’s team created a thin, durable insulating film, and in 1999, they launched Ajinomoto Build-Up Film (ABF). 

And it didn’t just work. It changed the game. 

What is Ajinomoto Build-Up Film (ABF)?

Picture a processor chip. It is a tiny silicon component packed with billions of transistors, each one needing clean, distinct electrical connections. But those connections don’t plug directly into your laptop’s motherboard. They’re mounted on a substrate – a layered platform of copper and an insulating material that distributes power and data.

Ajinomoto Build-Up Film

ABF is that insulating layer. It separates the copper traces that connect your chip to the larger circuitry. Think of it as the scaffolding of a high-rise – invisible, essential, and holding everything together. 

Without it, the chip fries. With it, chips became faster, smaller, and more reliable. 

Ajinomoto didn’t just build the whole substrate; it also made the magic layer. In fact, that layer proved so effective, so hard to replicate, that ABF quickly became an industry standard. By the mid-2000s, almost every high-performance processor, from Intel CPUs to NVIDIA GPUs, used substrates built on Ajinomoto’s film. 

A food company, quite literally, became the foundation of the digital age.

Pandemic, processors, and a profitable plot twist

For years, Ajinomoto’s tech side played second fiddle to its food empire. But as the pandemic hit, demand for computers and servers skyrocketed. Work-from-home, school-from-home, stream-everything-from-home; it all ran on chips, and those chips needed ABF. 

Suddenly, Ajinomoto’s materials division was no longer a footnote; it was the headline. In 2021, profits from its functional materials segment jumped a whopping 53 per cent. For the first time in Ajinomoto’s history, tech outshone tofu. 

By late 2022, Ajinomoto’s stock hit an all-time high, riding not just the wave of umami but that of AI, data centres, and 5G. The company quietly became a market leader in a multibillion-dollar semiconductor niche. One analyst noted that 90 per cent of the world’s computers contain processors insulated by ABF. Ajinomoto, improbably, held a near-monopoly. 

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But success brought stress. A global chip shortage triggered bottlenecks, and ABF became one of them. With only Ajinomoto producing at the scale and quality required, demand outstripped supply. 

Tech giants began hedging their bets, funding alternate solutions. Ajinomoto, meanwhile, doubled down, investing hundreds of millions to expand its ABF factories and boost output by 50 per cent by 2030. Because in this new world, one thing is clear – from laptops to server farms, the world runs on substrates.

Ajinomoto today: Two worlds, one molecule

It’s a poetic paradox. The same company that made seasoning packets for ramen now makes invisible films for AI servers. The same glutamate chemistry that once flavour-bombed your Manchurian gravy is now helping route signals across nanoscopic chip architectures. 

Ajinomoto’s food division still thrives. Its frozen gyoza, soup cubes, and classic MSG bottles remain pantry staples across Asia. But the flashiest growth, the investor buzz, the strategic future? That lies in polymer films and semiconductors. 

CEO Taro Fujie has already pledged to outpace investment projections to keep up with demand. The goal is to stay the king of ABF as new challengers circle, and new frontiers like quantum computing and next-gen smartphones come calling.

A toast to taste and tech

In the end, Ajinomoto’s journey is more than just a trivia tidbit; it’s a reminder that innovation rarely follows a straight line. A culinary chemical born in a bowl of broth is now a linchpin of the computing revolution. A product once shunned in kitchens across the world now lives inside nearly every device we own. 

Maybe next time we hear someone in a Mumbai restaurant mutter “no Ajinomoto, please”, we’ll smile, knowing there’s a little Ajinomoto in their laptop, quietly doing its job.