Hong Kong Stock Concept Tracking | NVIDIA confirms the use of M9 materials, a new wave in the PCB industry is about to arrive (with concept stocks)

According to relevant industry news, NVIDIA has confirmed the use of M9 materials in the next-generation product Rubin. In the Rubin series, which will be released in the second half of next year, both the CPX and midplane PCBs will use M9 CCL. Due to the extreme shortage of Q fabric (quartz fabric/third-generation fabric), NVIDIA is evaluating whether to also use M9 for compute and switch trays, with the evaluation for the switch tray to be determined by the end of November.

The 27-year Rubin Ultra# has confirmed the use of orthogonal backplanes instead of copper cables, M9 materials, and three 26-layer boards combined into a 78-layer board.

The market space for just CPX, midplane, and orthogonal backplanes is nearly 100 billion.

CICC released a research report stating that Rubin CPX is a GPU released by NVIDIA (NVDA.US) specifically designed for handling ultra-long context AI inference tasks, featuring an innovative decoupled inference architecture. Rubin CPX brings significant changes on the hardware side, including a wireless cable architecture for connectors/PCBs, and the addition of the Paladin B2B connector connected to the midplane PCB located in the middle of the chassis.

Rubin CPX introduces significant innovations in PCB, connectors, and cooling architectures, which is expected to greatly increase its hardware market scale. CICC estimates that NVIDIA's AI PCB market size is expected to reach $6.96 billion by 2027, a 142% increase compared to 2026.

Huajin Securities released a research report stating that artificial intelligence (AI) is generating new growth momentum for the PCB industry, with the industry's prosperity continuing to rise.

According to data from Sullivan Research, the global PCB market size, measured by sales revenue, has grown from $62 billion in 2020 to $75 billion in 2024, with a compound annual growth rate of 4.9% from 2020 to 2024.

The value of a single PCB for AI servers is far higher than that of traditional servers, and the demand for high-performance PCBs will increase significantly.

From a materials perspective, materials with low dielectric constant and low dissipation factor are most suitable. Q fabric performs far better than second-generation fabric and may disrupt the original fiberglass fabric raw material route.

Institutions strongly recommend M9 upstream and downstream as well as related PCB manufacturers.

Kingboard Laminates (01888): Kingboard Laminates achieved a revenue of HKD 9.588 billion in the first half of this year, an increase of 11% year-on-year; net profit was HKD 933 million, an increase of 28% year-on-year. In addition, a recent wave of price increases for copper-clad laminates has occurred, with Kingboard, Wellybond, and Hongruixing all raising prices by HKD 5-10 per sheet on August 15. Kaiyuan Securities pointed out that the company has already raised copper-clad laminate prices in the second half of 2025, and strong PCB demand may support price rigidity, with performance in the second half of the year expected to benefit; the layout of high-end CCL and material production capacity is expected to accelerate in 2026, and AI options are likely to enter a realization period, driving the valuation center upward, with actual report contributions likely to be concentrated in 2027.

Kingboard Group (00148): The group is laying out the entire industry chain of upstream raw materials and downstream PCBs. The group is vigorously building a copper-clad panel R&D center equipped with high-precision equipment, and has successfully developed various high-frequency and high-speed products that can be applied to GPU motherboards in AI servers. Kingboard Group announced its interim results, with a revenue of approximately HKD 21.608 billion, a year-on-year increase of 6%; The net profit was approximately HKD 2.582 billion, a year-on-year increase of 71%; Cheung Kwok Wing, Chairman of Kintor Group, stated that the rapid development of AI has led to strong demand for emerging electronic products centered around the AI concept, driving the demand growth for the group's copper-clad laminate products and printed circuit board products. He mentioned that the group plans to establish an AI circuit board production line in Kaiping, Guangdong, with an investment scale expected to reach approximately RMB 800 million to 1 billion, and indicated that related orders are saturated, with full load expected in the first half of next year, describing the situation as optimistic