HP and Dell are concerned about circuit board supply in 2027, Amazon invests in Jinxing Electronics

The shortage caused by the AI boom has extended from GPUs and memory to circuit boards. When planning their supply chains for 2027, HP and Dell found that even previously inconspicuous printed circuit boards could face shortages. In September this year, Amazon invested approximately 1.59 billion New Taiwan Dollars in Taiwanese circuit board manufacturer Gold Circuit Electronics, transitioning from customer to shareholder.

AI servers require circuit boards with more layers and lower signal loss, and chip packaging substrates are becoming larger, driving up the demand for key materials such as specialty fiberglass cloth and copper-clad laminates. Suppliers prioritize fulfilling more profitable AI orders, squeezing ordinary servers, with some ordinary server circuit board delivery times approaching one year.

It is difficult for the production capacity of key materials to keep up with demand in the short term. TrendForce estimates that Japan's Nitto Denko controls about 90% of the global T-glass specialty fiberglass cloth market, with new production capacity not expected to come online until mid-2027 at the earliest. The chairman of Taiwanese substrate manufacturer Unimicron Technology warned on October 20 that some key materials could be short by about 20% by 2027, with delivery times for some chip substrate production equipment extending to as long as 30 months.