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Is China Plus One Still Happening in the PCB Industry?
April 28, 2026 | Manfred Huschka, Manfred Huschka Management Consulting (Shenzhen) Ltd.Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
For much of the past five years, China Plus One has been shorthand for supply-chain diversification: reducing dependency on mainland China by adding manufacturing capacity elsewhere in Asia. In the PCB industry, however, in early 2026, it is more nuanced. It looks less like a clean geographic shift and more like a layered, capital-intensive rebalancing of global capacity, one that still leaves China deeply embedded at the center.
From Decoupling to ‘Webs of Connection’
At the 56th World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney succinctly captured this changing mindset in a Q&A session on de-risking from China. He warned that excluding major nodes from global networks is not risk management but a strategic mistake, and that supply chains are increasingly webs of connection, not binary choices.
That framing resonates strongly with today’s PCB ecosystem. While investments across Southeast Asia are accelerating, very few industry players are fully exiting China. Instead, they are redistributing risk and cost across multiple geographies while keeping advanced capabilities anchored in China’s mature manufacturing ecosystem.
The Core Market Driver: AI Servers
Before examining regional investment patterns, it is essential to understand the dominant market driver reshaping the PCB industry: AI servers.
According to Goldman Sachs research published in early 2026,1,2 the rapid escalation of AI server capabilities is triggering a supercycle in the PCB and copper-clad laminate (CCL) industries. As AI servers transition from node-level to cluster-level architectures, requirements for CCL, PCBs, and interconnects are rising sharply, with 800G to 1.6T networking becoming an industry standard.
Goldman Sachs highlights several structural implications:
- Material upgrades, with platforms moving from Panasonic M7/M8 toward higher-grade, faster materials often referred to as M9-class and beyond
- Sharp growth in value density, with Goldman Sachs projecting the AI server PCB market to expand from approximately $3 billion in 2024 to over $25 billion by 2027, and CCL demand growing even faster off a smaller base
- Higher-layer PCB designs, driven by integrated AI rack architectures such as NVIDIA’s VR200 and VR300 platforms
- Architectural shifts, where PCB backplanes and midplanes increasingly replace traditional copper cabling
- Supply-side constraints, giving pricing power to suppliers capable of producing high-end CCL and advanced PCBs
This front-loaded investment cycle is reshaping competitive dynamics across the PCB value chain.
To continue reading this article, which appeared in the April 2026 issue of I-Connect007 Magazine, click here.
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