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Nittobo gets another article in Nikkei Asia today.

TAIPEI/TOKYO -- It looks something like heavy-duty plastic wrap and is buried so deep in the guts of an iPhone that most users don't even know it exists. But short supplies of high-end glass cloth fiber have Apple scrambling against the likes of Nvidia, Google and Amazon to secure the same scarce resource.

Glass cloth is a critical component in chip substrates and printed circuit boards (PCBs), themselves the building blocks of electronic devices, and the most advanced types of this cloth are made almost exclusively by one Japanese company: Nitto Boseki, or Nittobo for short.

Apple was an early adopter of Nittobo's glass cloth for iPhones. Initially, there was little issue with supply. The AI boom has turbo-charged demand for high-performance PCBs made with premium glass cloth, meaning deep-pocketed AI companies are now also hungry for Nittobo's products, putting not just Apple but also mobile chip giant Qualcomm at risk of supply shortages.

The constraints in glass fiber and the resulting crunch in PCB supplies are creating what one industry insider calls "one of the biggest bottlenecks for the electronics-making and AI industry for 2026."

Amid growing concerns, Apple dispatched staff to Japan last autumn, stationing them at Mitsubishi Gas Chemical to try to secure more supplies of materials used in BT substrates, sources told Nikkei Asia.

Many types of chips require BT substrates -- or bismaleimide triazine substrates, as they are formally known -- as their base, including those used in iPhones and other mobile devices. And to produce its BT substrate materials, MGC needs Nittobo's glass cloth.

The iPhone maker went even further and asked Japanese government officials if they could help secure more supplies from Nittobo to meet its 2026 product roadmap, people familiar with the matter said -- a particularly urgent concern as Apple prepares to introduce its first ever foldable iPhone and for a further recovery of the handset market this year.
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Apple is also working hard to cultivate alternative sources, including sending employees to a small Chinese glass fiber maker known as Grace Fabric Technology (GFT) and asking MGC to help oversee the Chinese material supplier's quality improvement, two sources familiar with the matter said.

The iPhone maker is not the only one worrying. Qualcomm is the world's leading mobile chip builder and supplies processors for premium smartphones such as those from Samsung Electronics. Sources told Nikkei Asia that Qualcomm visited another, smaller Japanese glass cloth supplier Unitika to see if it could help ease the constraints. The quantity that Unitika produces, however, is far smaller than that of Nittobo, they said.

"This is one of the biggest bottlenecks for the electronics-making and AI industry for 2026," an executive from a supplier to Nvidia and Apple told Nikkei Asia.

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Many new entrants are hoping to capitalize on the constrained supply, such as Taiwan Glass, a traditional glass maker based in Taipei, and China's Taishan Fiberglass, Grace Fabric and Kingboard Laminates Group.

But the technological barriers to entry are extremely high -- every glass fiber is much thinner than a human hair and must be perfectly round and free of any bubbles -- and newcomers are struggling to achieve adequate capacity and consistent quality, people familiar with the situation said. No tech giant is willing to risk mounting their high-end chips on substrates that could compromise the quality of its final products, industry executives told Nikkei Asia.

"The stability of T-glass cloth is a decisive factor for substrate quality," said a source with a substrate equipment maker, while a PCB manufacturing executive said that its location deep inside a device's substrate means it cannot be taken out and fixed later.

Apple pioneered the use of high-end glass fiber in its smartphones, well before AI chip leaders began deploying such materials at [...]

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