Author: Peng Cheng
Currently, the global electronic information industry is experiencing severe supply chain turbulence triggered by the explosive growth of AI computing power. As the "mother of electronic products," the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) is an indispensable core foundational component for all electronic devices, and its supply chain is now facing an unprecedented supply shortage. This industry-wide supply-demand imbalance is primarily caused by the surging downstream demand for AI computing power and multiple constraints on the supply of upstream core raw materials. It has not only sparked a price hike wave across the entire industry chain but also transmitted cost pressures layer by layer along the supply chain, profoundly reshaping the competitive landscape of the global PCB industry.
01 Across-the-Board Price Hikes in Upstream Raw Materials, Supply Chain Tension Fermenting at the Source
In the PCB cost structure, raw materials account for approximately 60%, including Copper Clad Laminate (CCL), copper foil, copper balls, prepreg, gold salt, dry film, ink, etc. Among these, CCL accounts for about 27%, prepreg for about 14%, and copper balls, copper foil, and gold salt collectively account for around 7%. Price fluctuations in raw materials directly determine the cost baseline of the PCB industry.
As a primary raw material, the full name of CCL is Copper Clad Laminate, which is the core base material for PCBs. CCL is mainly composed of reinforcing materials such as electronic glass fiber cloth and paper-based substrates impregnated with special resins, which are then laminated with copper foil under high temperature, high pressure, and vacuum conditions. It is a key material for the miniaturization and high-speed performance of electronic products. As the three main materials of CCL, copper foil, resin, and glass fiber cloth are simultaneously facing shortages and price hikes.
Copper Clad Laminate (CCL) sector: CCL leader Kingboard Laminates has issued another price hike notice. It explicitly stated that due to the recent surge in chemical product prices and continuous supply tension, CCL costs have risen sharply, resulting in a 10% price increase for all the company's board materials and prepreg (PP) products. As of now, the company has raised its ex-factory prices three consecutive times this year. On the international front, Japanese giant Mitsubishi Gas Chemical officially announced a 30% price increase for its full range of high-end PCB materials, including CCL and prepreg, effective April 1, marking the third price hike for the company within half a year. Japan's Resonac also announced in January 2026 that, affected by rising costs of raw materials such as copper foil and glass cloth, as well as labor costs, the prices of its full range of copper clad laminates and adhesive sheets will increase by over 30% starting in March.
Copper foil sector: In 2025, Mitsui Mining & Smelting raised prices for its high-end copper foil to customers, with an average increase of about 15%. Other manufacturers also proposed price hikes, highlighting the supply-demand imbalance in the high-end copper foil market. Recently, Mitsui Mining & Smelting notified customers again that it will increase the prices of all its MicroThin copper foil products by 12% starting from April 2026. As the leading enterprise with a market share of nearly 90% in the high-end circuit foil field, Mitsui Mining & Smelting's pricing moves are sufficient to influence the cost trends of the entire industry chain.
Glass fiber cloth sector: The price of electronic glass fiber cloth has stabilized and is on the rise. Starting in the second half of 2025, the industry entered a clear price hike cycle, with significant price increases for both ordinary electronic cloth and upstream electronic yarn. Moreover, the price hike trend has spread from high-end products to all categories. Data shows that from October and December 2025 to January and February 2026, ordinary electronic cloth has experienced four price hikes, with the cumulative increase for 7628 thick cloth reaching 1 to 1.2 RMB per meter, and thin cloth seeing even larger increases. On February 4, industry leaders such as Guangyuan New Material and Chongqing Polycomp International Corporation issued price hike notices again. Not only has the magnitude of the price adjustment further increased, but the price adjustment cycle has also significantly shortened compared to before.
02 Structural Reasons for Supply Chain Tension
The current supply tension in the PCB industry chain is not a short-term market fluctuation, but the inevitable result of the long-term imbalance between the structural explosion on the demand side and the rigid constraints on the supply side. The scissors gap formed by the two continues to widen the supply-demand gap across the entire industry.
On the one hand, the explosive growth of AI computing power demand directly drives PCB demand. Since August 2025, NVIDIA's H200 GPU servers have been deployed on a large scale in global data centers. The PCB usage per AI server has increased by 3 to 5 times compared to traditional servers, and the value has increased by 8 to 12 times. This is mainly due to the extensive application of high-value components such as GPU boards and NVSwitch in AI servers. In terms of cost proportion, PCB accounts for 8% to 12% of the cost in AI servers, while this proportion is only 3% to 5% in traditional servers. The dual increase in demand scale and value directly drives up the rigid demand for high-end PCBs and upstream raw materials.
More notably, the incremental demand brought by technological iteration continues to be released. NVIDIA's Rubin servers, expected to be mass-produced and shipped in the second half of 2026, will adopt M9-grade CCL base materials. This technological upgrade will directly drive the demand for high-end materials such as HVLP4 copper foil, hydrocarbon resin, and Low-Dk third-generation electronic cloth into a new round of explosive growth, adding further pressure to the already tight supply chain.
On the other hand, there are multiple constraints on the supply side, with capacity release severely lagging behind demand growth. First, the rigid restriction on raw material supply. In recent years, domestic environmental protection and work safety supervision have continued to tighten. Coupled with the decline in mine grades, the mining and supply of metal raw materials such as copper and tungsten have been significantly constrained. Meanwhile, the ongoing geopolitical turmoil in the Middle East has directly impacted the global chemical raw material supply chain, leading to a severe shortage and price surge of basic chemical products such as epoxy resin, choking the supply of the PCB industry chain at the source. Second, the severe imbalance in capacity structure. The high-end PCB raw material market shows a highly concentrated pattern, with the capacity of core materials such as HVLP copper foil, high-end electronic cloth, and special resins mostly concentrated in the hands of manufacturers in Japan and the Taiwan region of China. Although domestic enterprises are accelerating technological breakthroughs, the downstream certification cycle for high-end materials is long and the technical barriers are high, making it difficult to form effective capacity supply in the short term, and the supply-demand gap is hard to fill quickly. In addition, the prolonged delivery time of key production equipment has also become an important factor delaying capacity release. Taking the Japanese high-end weaving machines required for electronic cloth production as an example, the equipment delivery cycle has been significantly extended, directly making it difficult for domestic manufacturers to implement their expansion plans, and the progress of capacity release is far behind the demand growth rate. Moreover, domestic equipment cannot meet the technical requirements for thin and ultra-thin cloth.
As the bargaining power of upstream raw material links has significantly increased, cost pressures are continuously transmitting downstream along the industry chain, triggering a chain reaction across the entire industry.
03 Downstream Application Markets Face Chain Reactions
As a universal foundational component in the electronics industry, the supply chain tension and price hikes of PCBs are comprehensively transmitting along the industry chain to core downstream fields such as consumer electronics, server data centers, and automotive electronics.
In the consumer electronics sector, price hikes for terminal products have become an established reality. In addition to memory chips, the cost pressure brought by price increases in core components such as PCBs has also become one of the drivers for price hikes in consumer electronics terminals. Especially as the foldable screen smartphone market continues to expand, the HDI boards equipped in them have been upgraded to the Substrate-Like PCB (SLP) level, further increasing the technical requirements and production costs for PCBs. Foldable screen smartphones need to adopt Rigid-Flex PCB, Multilayer Flexible Printed Circuit (FPC), and SLP technologies, which inherently require the extensive use of high-end materials. Meanwhile, the complex signal transmission requirements for dual-screen connections and hinge areas have also significantly increased the number of layers and area of PCBs, further amplifying the impact of rising costs.
In the server and data center sector, the delivery cycle for high-multilayer PCBs with more than 20 layers required by AI servers has been extended to 8-12 weeks. Supply delays have directly affected the mass production and delivery progress of AI servers. Moreover, the significant increase in the value of PCBs per unit has directly driven up the capital expenditures of global cloud providers and data centers, becoming a non-negligible cost variable in the implementation of AI computing infrastructure.
In the automotive electronics sector, the game between incremental demand and cost pressure continues to intensify. The in-depth development of automotive electrification and intelligence continues to drive the demand growth for automotive PCBs. The demand proportion of the three-electric systems (battery, motor, and electronic control) for PCBs has increased to 15%, and the popularization of silicon carbide power modules has even created new demand for high-end PCB products such as ceramic substrates. At the same time, automotive-grade PCBs are rapidly developing towards high-level functionality and lightweighting. The price hike pressure from upstream raw materials is gradually transmitting from PCB manufacturers to vehicle manufacturers, becoming a new challenge for cost control in the automotive industry chain.
04 Reshaping the Global Industry Chain Landscape
This industry-wide supply-demand crisis is also profoundly rewriting the competitive landscape of the global PCB industry. Regional capacity migration and accelerated domestic substitution have become the two main themes of industry development.
On the one hand, to avoid international trade risks, global PCB capacity is accelerating its shift to Southeast Asia, especially Thailand. Over the past two years, more than 100 PCB investment projects have been implemented in Thailand, with a total investment of over 170 billion Thai baht. A large number of projects are expected to be put into production successively starting from 2025, and Southeast Asia is emerging as a new growth pole for the global PCB industry.
On the other hand, the domestic substitution process of the domestic PCB industry chain is comprehensively accelerating, with policy support and technological breakthroughs forming a dual driving force. In the field of high-end CCL, domestic enterprises such as Shengyi Technology have achieved key technological breakthroughs. In the HVLP copper foil track, manufacturers such as Defu Technology are accelerating their catch-up. In the high-end electronic cloth market, enterprises like Honghe Technology have broken the technological monopoly of overseas manufacturers. Domestic enterprises have achieved technological breakthroughs to varying degrees in every link of the high-end PCB industry chain.
Policy support has further accelerated the domestic substitution process. In 2025, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) officially released two draft documents for comments: the "Regulatory Conditions for the Printed Circuit Board Industry (2025 Edition)" and the "Regulatory Announcement Management Measures for the Printed Circuit Board Industry (2025 Edition)". Through the dual gates of "prohibiting low-end capacity expansion + forcing R&D with capital", the policies are expected to direct over 80% of new capacity directly to high-end fields such as high-multilayer boards with more than 20 layers, HDI, and IC substrates. The strong guidance of policies, coupled with the market demand, has ushered in a critical window period for high-end breakthroughs in the domestic PCB industry chain.
05 Conclusion
In the short term, the continuous explosive growth of AI computing power demand will remain the main growth line of the PCB industry chain. However, the supply constraints of upstream raw materials are difficult to fundamentally alleviate in the short term. The supply tension and price hike wave across the entire industry chain will continue, and the downward transmission of cost pressures will become the industry norm. In the long run, this supply chain crisis is not only a challenge faced by the domestic PCB industry but also a historic opportunity to achieve high-end breakthroughs and complete domestic substitution. With the continuous breakthroughs of domestic enterprises in core materials and technologies, coupled with strong policy support, China's PCB industry is expected to achieve leapfrog development from "scale leadership" to "technological leadership" in the process of global industry landscape reconstruction.