Will M9 Material Revolutionize the PCB Industry?

November 10, 2025

According to industry reports, NVIDIA has confirmed it will use M9 material in its next-generation Rubin products, set for release in the second half of next year. Within the Rubin series, both the CPX and midplane PCBs will utilize M9 CCL. Due to a severe shortage of Q-cloth (quartz fabric, third-generation fabric), NVIDIA is evaluating whether to also adopt M9 for the compute and switch tray, with the switch tray assessment expected to be finalized by the end of November.

By 2027, Rubin Ultra will replace copper cables with orthogonal backplanes, creating an ultra-high-density 78-layer PCB by combining three 26-layer boards. The market size for just these three components – CPX, midplane, and orthogonal backplanes – is approaching one hundred billion RMB.

CICC released a report stating that the Rubin CPX is a GPU designed by NVIDIA specifically for handling ultra-long-context AI inference tasks, featuring an innovative decoupled inference architecture. The Rubin CPX introduces significant changes on the hardware side, including the adoption of a cable-less architecture for connectors and PCBs, along with the addition of Paladin B2B connectors to link with the PCB midplane located in the middle of the chassis.

The Rubin CPX brings substantial innovations in PCB, connector, and thermal architecture, which are expected to significantly increase the market size for its hardware components. CICC forecasts that the NVIDIA AI PCB market could reach $6.96 billion by 2027, a 142% increase from 2026.

Huajin Securities released a report indicating that artificial intelligence (AI) is generating new growth momentum for the PCB industry, with sector prosperity continuously rising.

According to Frost & Sullivan data, the global PCB market size, measured by sales revenue, grew from $62 billion in 2020 to $75 billion in 2024, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.9% during the 2020-2024 period.

The PCB value per AI server is significantly higher than that of traditional servers, leading to a substantial increase in demand for high-performance PCBs.

From the perspective of materials, materials with low dielectric constant and low dielectric loss factor are the most suitable. The performance of Q cloth is far superior to that of the second-generation cloth, or it may revolutionize the original raw material route of fiberglass cloth.