A new wave of price hikes is here again! Panasonic and Kingboard have raised the prices of copper-clad laminates (CCL) and electronic fabrics due to rising costs of copper foil and fiberglass cloth. As the global leader in ultra-low-loss CCL, Panasonic holds absolute pricing power. With the demand for PCBs and CCL in AI servers being 5–7 times that of traditional servers, this round of price increases will directly drive up the overall material costs for AI hardware. The AI sector is really feeling the squeeze from both ends right now. Upstream, prices are skyrocketing, while downstream, cloud providers and large model companies are locked in fierce competition. On top of that, debt financing costs remain high (thanks to high interest rates). No wonder—NVIDIA's earnings report was a big win yesterday, but storage and optical modules didn’t follow suit! This post is sponsored by @binancezh: 'Buy U.S. stocks on Binance—global assets, zero time lag, just one click away!'