Europe's PCB Comeback Is Colliding With a Supply Chain That Isn't Ready
Europe's printed circuit board industry is having a moment. Defence spending is up, AI is driving demand, and policymakers are finally talking about electronics as strategic infrastructure. But as I discovered in a recent EMS@C-Level conversation with Vytautas Ilgunas, Chief Commercial Officer at TLT PCB, and Raymond Goh, Chief Operating Officer at Confidee, the comeback is running headfirst into a supply chain that we spent the last two decades hollowing out. The demand is real. The capacity to serve it, particularly in materials, is not.
By Philip Stoten
The scale of the erosion is stark. As Vytautas pointed out, Europe had more than 600 PCB factories and around 20 laminate manufacturers twenty years ago. Today there are fewer than 150 PCB makers, with roughly 30 factories generating more than 70 percent of the market. More critically, Europe is now down to a single laminate manufacturer. As he put it, we didn't lose demand, we lost capacity. That distinction matters, because demand is exactly what is now surging back.
The current pressure point is laminate, and the culprit is AI. Raymond traced the shortage back to glass fabric, where the enormous appetite of AI hardware has soaked up capacity and, in his words, sucked the oxygen out of the room. What began in advanced materials has now cascaded down to standard FR4. In the good old days, a Chinese factory could source FR4 in three days. Today the lead time can stretch to three months. For advanced materials like Panasonic's M6 and M7, buyers are looking at six to nine months, and in some cases longer.
The economics explain why. Producing a square metre of advanced copper clad laminate consumes roughly the capacity of five square metres of standard FR4, and it sells at a far higher price. So as AI demand climbs, both capacity and pricing move against everyone else in the queue. That has flipped the fundamental logic of procurement. As Vytautas put it, availability is now more important than price, a phrase Raymond echoed. When you cannot get the material at any price, cost stops being the conversation.
The bottleneck runs deeper than glass. Raymond flagged a resin shortage compounded by geopolitics, noting that a petrochemical complex in Saudi Arabia affected by recent Middle East conflict supplies close to 70 percent of the world's resin for laminates and has yet to recover. It is a sobering reminder that the PCB supply chain reaches all the way back to petrochemicals and sand, and that a single disruption several tiers down can ripple through the whole industry. New copper clad laminate capacity is being built, including a large plant Raymond visited in China earlier this year, but nothing arrives overnight. Both guests expect the squeeze to persist into next year at least, with meaningful new capacity closer to the end of 2027 or even 2028.
That timeline is the crux of the problem. You cannot stand up laminate or PCB manufacturing in six months, or even one to two years. As Vytautas argued, advanced manufacturing decisions have to be made years before the market realises it needs them, because by the time a shortage arrives it is already too late. Europe is investing billions in AI, defence and data centres, but as he asked, who builds the hardware, and where? AI needs hardware, hardware needs advanced PCB, and advanced PCB needs laminate. To put numbers on it, a single AI data centre with around 100,000 GPUs translates into roughly 12,000 servers and some 200,000 advanced boards, and almost none of that can be produced in Europe today.
Policy is beginning to respond. CHIPS Act II and the Industrial Acceleration Act are pushing ‘Made in Europe' content requirements, and EMS companies scanning their bills of materials increasingly view the PCB as a realistic way to hit local content targets when semiconductors cannot be. But as both guests stressed, the policy conversation still skews toward chips while overlooking the wider ecosystem of laminate, board manufacturing and assembly. If one part disappears, Vytautas warned, Europe loses control.
So what can customers do now? The practical advice was consistent. Communicate early, share forecasts, reserve capacity, and crucially, approve multiple laminates so projects are not locked to a single material. Panic buying and ordering ahead of genuine demand, both guests agreed, only makes things worse for everyone. TLT, meanwhile, is pursuing vertical integration, bringing PCB, EMS, plastic moulding and eventually semiconductor and power modules under one roof.
The message I took away is that resilience is now a design decision, not a purchasing one. This will not be the last disruption, and the industry that plans through the cycle is the one that keeps producing when the market turns.
Philip Stoten is a journalist, speaker and host specialising in the global electronics manufacturing services industry. He hosts the PCB@C-Level Special, EMS@C-Level, MADE IN EUROPE and EMS India podcasts.
