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
(Image credit: Apple)
The burgeoning demand for Glass Cloth is creating a new, unforeseen shortage in the supply chain, with one Nikkei Asia source calling it “one of the biggest bottlenecks for the electronics-making and AI industry for 2026.” Considering we’ve already got shortages of memory, GPUs, power, and water to build and run these data centers, adding one more bottleneck isn’t going to help matters much.
Glass Cloth is not to be confused with Glass Substrates, which is a functionally distinct technology currently being adopted by the likes of AMD and Qualcomm.
In much the same way as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made trips to South Korea in the Fall of 2025 to court memory manufacturers, some companies saw this glass cloth shortage coming. Apple reportedly sent representatives to Japan to try to secure greater supplies of the materials used in developing PCBs in various products, including the glass cloth fibers produced by Nittobo. These meetings included interactions with Japanese government officials to see if Apple could be awarded a greater share of the company’s production.
It wasn’t the only company to do so, either. Nvidia and AMD have dispatched staff to Nittobo’s headquarters to try to secure more favorable deals.
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