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Remember 2021? Despite COVID, the electronics industry hit a high. Then came the slide. By 2023, the industry was deep in the red. With inflation, policy shifts, and exchange rate shocks, the problems were long, and the outlook was bleak.
Recovery finally appeared in 2024, but it was fragile. Automotive electronics slumped, wireless demand stayed soft, and the ride up was anything but smooth. Yet, amid the uncertainty, one bright track emerged: artificial intelligence (AI).
AI: From Buzzword to Market Lifeline
From ChatGPT to DeepSeek, AI went from being a tech curiosity to a computing revolution. It isn’t just about smart chatbots. AI workloads demand massive computing power, and that power comes from data centers stuffed with high-performance servers, each built with advanced chips, substrates, and, most importantly for our industry, PCBs.
In NVIDIA’s first three quarters of 2024, the company’s revenue jumped 134% year-over-year. Its AI GPUs are now the beating heart of AI servers, and those servers are, in turn, driving PCB demand.
Prismark’s analysis, as presented by Dr. Shiuh-Kao Chiang at the HKPCA show last December, tells the story: Despite a still-weak economy, global PCB production value climbed 5.8% in 2024.
The Data Center Gold Rush
Behind the AI buzz is a capital spending surge rarely seen. In just over a year, the big four cloud giants—Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft—nearly doubled their server and storage investments. Quarterly CapEx jumped from $30 billion in mid-2023 to $55 billion by Q3 2024, with annual totals expected to exceed $100 billion.
In late July, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced it would add $10 billion to its 2025 CapEx budget to support Cloud and AI demands. This money is being invested into AI infrastructure: racks of GPUs, high-bandwidth memory, advanced cooling, and ultra-high-speed interconnects.
As a result, AI server shipments more than doubled in 2024, hitting over one million units. Each server represents a major win for PCB makers, primarily in China and Asia, with $1,000–$2,000 worth of boards packed into every machine.
PCBs: From Recovery to Reinvention
Prismark, which tracks 160 of the world’s top PCB makers, confirms what the numbers suggest: AI demand is rewriting the PCB playbook:
- HDI boards were the biggest winner, soaring 17.8% in 2024
- High-layer-count boards for servers and network infrastructure also saw impressive gains
- Substrates told a split story: ABF substrates struggled under the weight of overcapacity and price drops, but BT substrates held strong
In the broader picture, from 2023 to 2024, the computer sector—servers and memory, in particular—surged more than 40%, while automotive electronics dropped and wireless stayed flat. Defense electronics added a small but steady boost as well. In 2025, it appears we may be seeing a resurgence in automotive electronics, somewhat driven by sensor technology.
Not Just a Fad
Coming out of 2024, it was tempting to think of AI as another passing tech wave. Dr. Shiuh-Kao Chiang, who presented a technical seminar at HKPCA 2024, argued otherwise. AI isn’t a blip. It’s forcing structural change in how boards are designed, substrate complexity, and layer counts for server motherboards. It’s pushing the industry toward new materials, processes, and production geographies.
Prismark projects PCB production will grow 6.1% in 2025, with AI leading the charge. He declared strongly that it won’t stop at cloud data centers. Expect defense, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and biomedical computing to deepen their AI adoption—and their need for advanced boards. So far, in 2025, Dr. Chiang appears to have been absolutely right.
The Golden Track Ahead
The electronics industry isn’t out of the woods. Geopolitics, tariffs, and supply chain reshuffling are still reshaping where and how boards are built and where some will be built. But one thing is clear: AI isn’t just driving growth. It’s rewriting the rules of the game.
For PCB makers, it’s an opportunity and a wake-up call to capitalize on this immense market opportunity. AI isn’t a side story. It’s the engine powering the industry’s next chapter.
Stay tuned for the second article in this installment: “Inside the AI Hardware Boom: Servers, Substrates and Advanced Packaging.”
This article is based on insights shared by Dr. Shiuh-Kao Chiang of Prismark during his technical seminar at HKPCA 2024 with some editorial discourse based on this article being published in I-Connect007 in 2025. Any omissions are unintentional. The original content was published in the Journal of HKPCA 2025, Q2, No. 94. For more details, visit www.prismark.com or contact the author at edy@e-cio.cn.
