news briefing 

The National Science Foundation (NSF) plans to invest US$220 million – equivalent to more than NT$6 billion - to work with Google, Amazon, Intel, and others to establish artificial intelligence research centers throughout 40 states in the US. Since these major companies rely on Taiwanese factories for their cloud servers, Inventec, Quanta, Foxconn, and Wistron will benefit from these investments.

impact analysis 
 

Since the outbreak of the epidemic, social distancing and remote work has driven application markets like 5G communications, cloud AI, and others. The demand for servers as indispensable hardware to these markets has also increased. Nonetheless, during the turbulent terminal market period last year, global servers continuously maintained steady shipments. However, only North America, which accounts for the largest share of global server shipments, held back in the first quarter. This was due to decreased demand from ultra-large-scale data centers and service providers, coupled with a raised base period for shipment growth in 2020Q1. This has rendered the global server market this year to experience a relatively greater rate of recession in the first quarter. However, it is expected that there will be a new wave of demand for servers to support growth in the future alongside the US government’s newly-launched AI center investment plans.

 

In recent years, Intel and AMD have competed fiercely on server platforms and have successively launched new-generation platform architectures. Since the number of PCB layers required for the new platform is thicker, the number of layers for multilayer HLC boards among these can reach 24 to 30 layers. On the other hand, ABF substrate is furnished with a design requiring 18 to 20 layers. Given the increased number of layers, this also suggests that the product will have stricter requirements for signal transmission loss and stability. Because of this, related applications like high-frequency and high-speed substrate materials or high-speed copper foil should become issues worthy of attention.