Hong Kong's PCB concept stocks experienced a significant downturn on July 6th, with several companies seeing substantial drops. JianTao Laminates (01888.HK) fell over 18% after an earlier rise of nearly 9%, Xinqiwei (09630.HK) dropped over 14%, Sheng Hong Technology (02476.HK) and JianTao Group (00148.HK) both saw declines exceeding 11%, Guanghe Technology (01989.HK) was down over 10%, Dazhu CNC (03200.HK) lost over 7%, and China Building Materials (03323.HK) fell over 6%. This broad market reaction was triggered by news regarding NVIDIA's next-generation AI server architecture.
The decline was spurred by a series of social media posts from semi-conductor research firm SemiAnalysis. The firm reported that NVIDIA's Kyber NVL144 rack architecture, which had only been showcased by CEO Jensen Huang three months prior at GTC, is expected to face delays of more than 12 months, pushing its release to 2028. The primary reason cited for this delay was significant manufacturing challenges with the PCB backplane.
While NVIDIA has refuted rumors of demanding a 10% price cut from PCB suppliers, the focus has shifted to technological bottlenecks as the real cause of potential delays. DailyAlpha reports suggest that the 'Kyber' backplane, an advanced PCB designed for the future Rubin Ultra system, might see its volume production slip from 2027 to 2028. This points to the complexity of design and integration rather than pricing disputes. Critical issues include the prolonged certification process for HBM4 memory, adaptation work for network transmission upgrades from CX8 to CX9, challenges in rack-level power management, and the overall efficiency tuning of higher-specification liquid cooling solutions for the Rubin platform. TrendForce's April survey already indicated that the Rubin series shipment proportion was estimated to drop from the originally planned 29% to 22%, with the Blackwell series growing to 71%.
Jefferies analyst reports, as cited by HTX Insights, confirm the Kyber delay. The Rubin Ultra, initially planned to use the orthogonal backplane PCB (Kyber architecture), will likely revert to the Oberon architecture in 2027 due to intra-rack connectivity technology bottlenecks. Kyber is now postponed to 2028 at the earliest and might even be canceled, directly impacting the PCB iteration timeline. The original global AI PCB market expectation for 202X was $25 billion; after excluding Kyber, it's $X billion. TSMC, a key partner in the AI supply chain, is reportedly raising prices for all 7nm and more advanced nodes by 5% to 10%, indicating upstream cost pressures are flowing downstream, not vice-versa. Sheng Hong Technology, a leading AI computing PCB stock, reported full-year 2025 operating revenue of $2.8 billion, a 79.77% increase, and net profit of $635.2 million, a 273.52% surge, holding a 13.8% global market share in AI and high-performance computing PCBs in the first half of 2025.
