Honey, the Hyperscalers Ate My Laminate

As Dr. Hayao Nakahara reported in his NTI-100 rankings last month, the 10 largest fabricators are focusing primarily on creating products for data centers. Data center PCBs are monopolizing more and more of the industry’s advanced materials and components that readers like you need.

Now, Nittobo, the weaver that makes most of the world’s T-glass specialty cloth, plans to triple its capacity to meet this demand, and laminate maker Kingboard has a six-month wait time for some high-end products after raising prices eight times this year.

TPCA believes there will be a tight market for these advanced materials and memory through at least 2027. But, as Naka pointed out, some cynical analysts believe we will see overcapacity in a few years, followed by a glut.

Our entire industry seems to have been caught flat-footed here. But consider this: Even five years ago, data centers were barely on our radar screen.

I first encountered the data center donnybrook in 2024, when I was dating a teacher who lived near the QTS data center in Fayetteville, GA, in metro Atlanta.

She had a bee in her bonnet regarding QTS. She said the project was pushed through by city and county officials in closed-door sessions in violation of state laws (it wasn’t), and that it would cause everyone around to get cancer or have deformed children (pretty unlikely).

To its credit, some elements of this facility are environmentally enviable. The site’s closed-loop cooling system, for instance, recycles water continuously, and the only water consumption is from restrooms and break rooms. It has almost no effect on the water grid. 

But the power grid is another story. Leased by Microsoft and OpenAI for model training, the site is custom-built for ultra-high-density AI compute clusters, and it uses more power per square foot than a typical cloud data center.

When it’s fully operational, the 6.2 million square-foot facility will consume 5 to 6 terawatt-hours of electricity per year, enough to power half a million average US homes for a year. The maximum power draw is 700 megawatts.

One day we drove to the data center so I could see what the fuss was about. It’s a sprawling complex of 13 buildings on 600 acres. And you can hear the humming a half mile away. I think it would be great for sleeping.

But my girlfriend acted like we were standing outside the factory in Soylent Green. Her fears didn’t ease when I mentioned that QTS had to follow FCC emissions regulations and that standing in front of a data center wouldn’t take years off our lives.

Still, she and her neighbors remain hyperfocused on hyperscalers. In response, Fayette County points to the economic upside: Once the QTS site is fully built out, it will bring in about $350 million annually in real estate and sales tax revenue.

County commissioners believe this data center will help the county offset the economic loss from Marvel’s movie production, which recently moved from Fayetteville to the UK.

Hundreds of movies and TV shows, including The Walking Dead and Ozark, have been filmed in the business-friendly Peach State, which actors have dubbed “Y’allywood.”

Likewise, we’ve seen this movie before. Today’s data centers are what we called server farms during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. That episode ended with reams of unneeded equipment being scrapped and physically destroyed or salvaged via brokers. It took years for many suppliers to dig out from the capacity glut.

Data centers are here to stay. We live in a data-collection world, and we are still in the early stages of tapping into how to understand and utilize all that information.

Perhaps this time we will unlock enough of the supply chain secrets to turn off the capacity builds just before the inevitable peak is crested.

Andy Shaughnessy is content architect of PCD&F/Circuits Assembly; andy@pcea.net.