Glass cloth could be the next great AI shortage, as major manufacturers scramble to secure critical material — Japanese manufacturer courted by Apple, Nvidia, Google, and Amazon

Alongside memory, power, water, and political capital, AI data center builders and major component manufacturers are now contending with a new bottleneck in their supply chains: Glass cloth. As Nikkei Asia reports, major tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, and Nvidia are all tussling over the supply of glass cloth fibers, which are vital to component production, and the most advanced types are produced by a singular Japanese company.

Nitto Boseki, or Nittobo, is a textile and fiberglass manufacturer based in Tokyo, and by the standards of these major tech firms, is a relatively small link in the chain, with a net income last year just over $37 million. But it now finds itself at the center of a new race among industry giants worth hundreds of times its value, all fighting over a limited supply of glass cloth fibers.

This special type of glass fiber material is known as low-coefficient-of-thermal-expansion (CTE) glass, colloquially known as T-Glass. The fibers are strong and rigid, facilitating high-speed data transmission, making them ideal for the latest generation processors, component PCBs, and various key AI components for the new data centers that everyone wants to build.

Like the memory industry shortages, this bottleneck for high-spec glass cloth risks interfering with major consumer component and device manufacturers like Apple, too.

There’s only so much glass out there