THE CRUNCH
The humble printed circuit board is becoming the latest bottleneck in the AI buildout. A Nikkei Asia report, citing several leading PC and PCB industry managers, points to looming PCB shortages and price rises in the coming months, as AI products outbid traditional PC and device makers for manufacturing capacity. An unnamed executive at an American PC maker said the company is struggling to secure enough PCBs to plan next year's products, even though PC shipments could decline again next year.
The numbers are stark. Some PCB orders now take up to 30 months to fulfil, with lead times on a significant number of products having doubled, according to one PCB maker. A supply firm told Nikkei that a new order placed today would not be delivered until late 2028. Upstream, a Taiwanese PC maker said costs for copper clad laminates, the core material in PCB construction, have surged at least 12 times since July.
One of the world's leading CCL suppliers says its order book is filling up to 2030, despite plans to triple capacity by 2028. PCB makers also need to secure multiple upstream materials, which can include CCLs and the specialised fiberglass used for PCB construction, and Nikkei reports that engineering salaries across the industry have already risen 20% to 30% as firms compete for skilled staff at new production facilities.
Related moves suggest how seriously the industry is taking this. Nvidia has recently announced partnerships with chip substrate makers Ibiden of Japan, Samsung Electro-Mechanics of South Korea and Taiwan's Unimicron, with Unimicron planning to expand capacity 2.5-fold over three years. Chip substrates are essentially the small, intricate PCBs that CPUs and GPUs are mounted on. PCBs have been viewed as an unglamorous, lower-tech part of the supply chain, partly due to the small numbers on the bill of materials, and that may now change as companies race to ramp up production of advanced PCBs and substrates.