What appears to be an ordinary green circuit board is becoming a key battleground for tech giants vying for computing power supremacy. Behind its scarcer-than-chips capacity lies a hidden market opportunity worth tens of billions of dollars.
Inside an AI server, the most familiar component is the GPU chip. Yet, the key determining whether computing power can be released at 100% is an unassuming “board” – the high-frequency printed circuit board (HF PCB). Its price can reach as high as 18,000 RMB per square meter, several times that of ordinary PCBs.
At the end of 2025, Google’s management dismissed a procurement lead for failing to secure long-term agreements with memory chip suppliers, risking the supply chain. A similarly fierce battle for production capacity is underway in the high-frequency PCB sector.
1 Industry Inflection Point: From Circuit Carrier to Computing Core
The PCB industry is undergoing a structural transformation. As noted in Guosheng Securities’ latest industry weekly report, a fundamental shift is occurring in AI server design.
Traditionally, PCBs served merely as passive platforms for circuit hosting. In the AI era, however, they have evolved into the core layer for computing power release. Take NVIDIA’s upcoming Rubin platform, for instance. Its “cable-less” design means connections once reliant on cables are now directly handled by the PCB itself.
This shift marks the PCB industry’s official entry into the “Three-High Era”: high frequency, high power, and high density. Consequently, the value of standard server PCBs has multiplied, a change fundamentally enabled by high-frequency PCB technology.
2 Technical Challenges: The Precise Dance Under High-Frequency Signals
High-frequency PCBs are not merely upgraded products. They operate at electromagnetic frequencies above 1GHz, demanding extremely stringent requirements for materials, design, and manufacturing processes.
The core challenge lies in signal integrity. In high-frequency circuits, faster digital signals have shorter rise times, which translates to higher bandwidth in the frequency domain.
The skin effect emerges as the primary challenge in high-frequency design: at extremely high frequencies, the electric field lacks sufficient time to diffuse across the entire conductive surface, causing current to concentrate in specific areas of the copper layer.
This leads to increased transmission line loss. Engineers must counteract this by altering stack-up structures, widening traces, or selecting smoother copper types.
Impedance control reaches an astonishing level of precision. In high-frequency PCB manufacturing, the accuracy of impedance control is paramount. Industry-leading manufacturers can achieve tolerances as tight as ±8%, with control within ±5 ohms for impedances below 50 ohms.
3 Material Innovation: The Strategic Value of Low-Loss Substrates
The core determinant of high-frequency PCB performance lies in the materials. Traditional FR-4 material reveals significant drawbacks at high frequencies—its relatively high and unstable dielectric constant, coupled with substantial dielectric loss, leads to severe signal energy attenuation.
Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) offers one solution. With its ultra-low dielectric loss factor (Df) and stable dielectric constant (Dk), it effectively ensures the high-speed and stable transmission of high-frequency signals.
Rogers Corporation’s laminates hold a unique position in the high-performance segment. Models like 4350B and 4003C, used by manufacturers such as Huaqiu Circuit, offer stable Dk, excellent thermal management, and low signal loss characteristics.
Driven by the proliferation of 5G millimeter-wave devices and automotive 77GHz millimeter-wave antennas, demand for these low-loss materials continues to grow.
4 Process Breakthroughs: The Manufacturing Race from Microns to Nanometers
The manufacturing processes for high-frequency PCBs are also undergoing upgrades. Traditional methods are increasingly inadequate for meeting the high-precision, high-integration demands of 5G circuit boards.
Laser Direct Imaging (LDI) technology is replacing traditional exposure processes. Through digital precision control, it enables the creation of circuit traces with widths/spacings as fine as 25μm or even less.
In the drilling process, ultrafast laser drilling technology utilizes picosecond pulsed lasers to create micro-blind vias with diameters as small as 50μm, fulfilling requirements for high-density interconnect (HDI).
Advanced plating and via-filling processes ensure uniform and dense copper deposition within the vias, reducing via impedance—a critical factor for enhancing signal integrity.
5 Market Explosion: The AI-Driven Demand Tsunami
Market demand is growing at an unprecedented rate. A Shanxi Securities research report indicates that servers/data storage have become the fastest-growing downstream segment for PCBs, with a projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.6% from 2024 to 2029.
China Merchants Securities points out that, driven by demand from AI computing centers, demand for AI-specific PCBs will maintain rapid growth, with tight supply trends expected to continue.
This demand directly fuels the entire industry chain. Full-process PCB manufacturers and upstream raw material suppliers are actively raising capital. For example, Gold Circuit Electronics raised 10.159 billion RMB through bond issuance in 2025, setting a record for the largest single fundraising round by a Taiwanese PCB manufacturer within China.
6 Application Frontiers: From 5G Base Stations to AI Servers
High-frequency PCBs have penetrated several critical fields. In 5G communications, they are used in base station antennas and radio frequency (RF) modules.
Within automotive electronics, high-frequency boards support the operation of ADAS sensors and battery management systems. The automotive 77GHz millimeter-wave antenna, in particular, creates especially urgent demand for high-frequency PCBs.
The market with the most explosive potential is AI servers. With the mass production of NVIDIA’s Rubin platform slated for 2026, and as cloud giants adopt high-layer HDI designs for their self-developed ASIC servers, demand for high-frequency PCBs will surge further.
As AI servers and related switches rapidly scale, both standard and AI servers are simultaneously imposing higher performance requirements on PCBs.
7 Domestic Substitution: The Journey Towards Supply Chain Autonomy
The high-end high-frequency PCB market has long been dominated by foreign companies, but this landscape is changing. In the field of Low-Dk electronic glass fabric, Chinese companies like Sinoma Science & Technology and Grace Electron have achieved stable product supply.
The HVLP (Very Low Profile) copper foil market also shows a trend of import substitution. This type of foil, with a surface roughness below 2μm, can significantly mitigate the skin effect in high-frequency signal transmission.
Several Chinese enterprises have completed the development of HVLP 4-5 grade products and have begun sample submissions and validation tests with downstream end customers. Domestic companies are accelerating their catch-up, and the trend of global production capacity concentrating in China is becoming increasingly evident.