By Lisa Wang / Staff Reporter
Zhen Ding Technology Holding Ltd (臻鼎), the world’s biggest printed circuit board (PCB) supplier, yesterday said it expects no near-term relief in the supply of PCBs, related components and materials, as demand remains driven by global cloud service providers’ (CSPs) investments in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.
The company’s comments dashed the hope that the supply constraints could be mitigated next year or in 2028. CSPs’ rapid expansion of AI servers is triggering severe supply constraints across the technology industry, spanning AI chips, substrates, PCBs and critical upstream materials such as copper clad laminate, T-glass and glass fiber fabric.
“We haven’t seen any relief in component shortages yet,” Zhen Ding chairman Charles Shen (沈慶芳) said at a media briefing at a trade show organized by the Taiwan Printed Circuit Association in Taipei. “Some people say the material shortage might clear up by 2027 or 2028, but there’s still no sign of it right now.”
Visitors walk past printed circuit boards displayed at the TPCA Show at Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center yesterday.
Photo: CNA
In addition to PCB-related components and materials, the company experienced extended lead times for manufacturing equipment, with laser tools seeing lead times stretch to 12 months, he added.
Zhen Ding counts Nvidia Corp, Apple Inc and US-based CSPs among its major customers.
The company sees still-strong AI infrastructure deployment by major CSPs despite stock market volatility on concern about rising borrowing costs, which recently hit a 25-year high.
Zhen Ding Technology Holding Ltd chairman Charles Shen poses for a photograph at the company’s booth at the TPCA Show in Taipei yesterday.
Photo: Lisa Wang, Taipei Times
Asked whether major CSPs would slow down AI server expansion due to surges in funding costs, Shen said the chances are slim.
“Capital remains abundant in the US market now,” he said.
To meet the surging demand for PCBs, the company is aggressively expanding its production capacity through 2030, Shen said.
By then, Zhen Ding expects to operate 59 factories across Taiwan, Thailand and China — more than doubling the current 28, he said.
The company’s capacity expansion matches the growth of the overall PCB market, which according to the Taiwan Printed Circuit Association is expected to surge to NT$130 billion to NT$140 billion (US$3.99 billion to US$4.29 billion) in 2030, compared with NT$80 billion to NT$90 billion last year.
A significant share of that new capacity would be utilized to produce high-density interconnects (HDI) and optical modules, which are used in AI servers, the company said.
Optical modules are a new growth engine, with revenue expected to rise next year from this year, Shen said.
That should boost the revenue share for HDIs to 38 percent in 2030, after surpassing revenue contribution from flexible printed circuit boards in 2028 for the first time, Shen said.
Flexible PCB, which is the company’s largest revenue contributor, should decline to about 20 percent in 2030, followed by rigid PCB to about 10 percent, he said.