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Aidan Jones

In the rush to build an AI future, semiconductors are the silicon rock stars that soak up all the applause. Yet behind the curtain, an unglamorous stagehand is doing much of the heavy lifting.
Printed circuit boards (PCBs) are the copper-laced panels inside every mobile phone, car key fob, digital camera and data-centre server rack on Earth. Without them, even the most advanced AI chip would be useless, unable to process even a single line of code.
This year alone, more than 1 million square metres (10.8 million sq ft) of PCBs will roll out of WellTek Electronics’ factory in Ayutthaya – just one company’s contribution to Thailand’s scramble for an edge in the global tech supply chain.
“They are essential to our daily life. They are in all electronics you are using,” said WellTek founder Jennifer Deng, who established the Thai subsidiary of her China-based Jiangxi Welgao Electronics in Ayutthaya two years ago.
Thailand is now Southeast Asia’s No 1 producer of PCBs – often described as the nervous system of modern electronics, channelling essential signals through increasingly complex arrays of semiconductors, resistors and capacitors – and the fifth largest in the world.
Deng’s US$75 million WellTek plant, built in under a year, is the first of two planned for Ayutthaya, a major Thai industrial zone once dominated by Japanese carmakers and global electronics giants, now being rewired for the artificial intelligence age.

Circuitous success
Malaysia may lead the field in lucrative semiconductors and Vietnam in electronics assembly, but PCBs give Thailand its competitive advantage in Southeast Asia’s race for tech relevance.
Its rise in this niche owes as much to the trade wars triggered by Washington as it does to the smart timing of Thai authorities in welcoming global companies seeking new bases away from the tariff line of fire.
“The market demanded movement to Thailand,” Deng told This Week in Asia from WellTek’s Ayutthaya headquarters, where workers in crisp company polo shirts hustled down corridors beneath posters bearing the mantra “Conscience and Altruism”.
Over the next few years, Deng not only wants to build a second factory but treble output to more than 3.6 million square metres (38.8 million sq ft) of PCBs per year.
Thailand’s existing PCB industry gave it a head start over rivals, she said, explaining that “Europeans and Americans all requested we are outside of China, and our main partners are here in Thailand.”
Narit Therdsteerasukdi, secretary general of Thailand’s government-run Board of Investment, told an investor forum on Wednesday that the country was at a “turning point”.
Investment in the PCB and electronics component sector topped US$10 billion over the past three years, he revealed, calling this proof of how Thailand should pivot its economy.
“We need to restructure our economy … and the electronic industry, especially PCBs, is a very good example [of how to do it],” he said. “The key question is where do we go from here?”
For Narit, the country’s future growth depends on climbing the value chain, backed by a higher-skilled workforce trained for the AI age.

Printed fortunes
PCBs are a rare success story in a decade of patchy industrial policy that has left Thailand a regional growth laggard.
Many of the ideas floated to accelerate growth through new manufacturing chains and a splurge of foreign investment have been delayed, watered down or scrapped entirely on contact with the reality of delivering big infrastructure projects in a politically febrile kingdom.
Trade dispute and fuel-price spikes from distant wars have further hurt an economy that expanded just 2.4 per cent last year – a relative crawl compared with Vietnam’s 8 per cent.
Yet around 60 per cent of all new investment into Southeast Asia’s PCB industry has flowed into Thailand since 2023, according to the Thailand Printed Circuit Association.
Phutana Daoruang, the association’s general manager, said Thailand already had the PCB infrastructure, built up by a dozen or so Taiwanese firms, when Donald Trump’s first presidency fired the starting gun on companies fleeing US tariffs.
Thailand’s location and logistics networks, tax breaks, industrial estates and skilled workforce allowed the new factories to plug straight into electronics clusters like Ayutthaya, with the upgraded deep-sea port at Laem Chabang – a two-hour drive away – providing a maritime gateway to China.

“We pitched to compete with Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam as the fundamental infrastructure was already here,” Phutana told This Week in Asia.
“Thailand is quite suitable, we are quite strong in logistics and electricity supply is stable – especially compared with Vietnam and Malaysia.”
There are now around 50 PCB companies in the country, forming a sector that meets a modest 5 per cent of world demand but is eager to capture more of a global market forecast to reach US$100 billion in the coming years.
The ambition is to export eight to 10 times more PCBs than Thailand currently does – reaching roughly US$18 billion to US$25 billion in trade volume and a 20 per cent global market share.
Lofty as that sounds, it may not be impossible given the trillions of dollars flowing into data centres that need increasingly complex layers of PCBs.
“It’s quite complicated and uses very specialised material,” Phutana said of PCB manufacturing. “Thailand has the fundamentals to do it.”
Running hot
AI has changed the stakes for PCB manufacturers. A PCB destined for use with an AI accelerator card – roughly the size of a sheet of A4 paper – is a very different beast from the boards that are found inside car key fobs.
Densely layered with winding copper traces that resemble an illuminated cityscape from above, these boards must survive extreme heat and power loads while shuttling vastly more data at far higher speeds, providing the physical foundations for the AI chips crunching numbers across the region’s data centres.
Thailand has attracted billions of US dollars of data-centre investment in recent years on the promise of booming AI demand – so much, so fast that the capital is arriving well ahead of the physical buildout of centres themselves.
But data centres are voracious consumers of water and electricity while creating comparatively few jobs, and domestic critics argue that beyond a handful of landlords, Thailand risks getting the environmental costs without the economic rewards.

Delta Electronics Thailand, the local arm of the Taipei-headquartered “grid to chip” manufacturer that became the first company on the Thai stock exchange to be valued above US$100 billion in February, is now eyeing a bigger prize – the power and cooling systems that keep those centres humming.
In the Thai electronics world, Delta is the gatekeeper to the big data-centre contracts – and as it grows, Thailand and its PCB makers are desperate to keep it on side.
“Thailand is moving beyond cost competitiveness towards higher-value industries,” Delta said in a statement, pointing to “advanced engineering talent, energy infrastructure readiness and supply chain depth” as the areas that, with “continued progress” and “pro-business policies”, could give the country a lasting regional edge.
Not everyone shares that confidence. Analysts the world over have grown increasingly nervous about an AI investment bubble and what its bursting might do to countries that have calibrated their industrial strategy on the boom continuing.
Even Delta admits to being “mindful” of “tariff uncertainty, engineering talent gaps, supply chain constraints, intensifying competition in AI infrastructure” and the difficulty of scaling manufacturing “while maintaining quality and profitability”.
Down on the factory floor, the constraints are more immediate. PCB manufacturing demands “a crazy amount of water each day”, according to Thailand Printed Circuit Association chief Phutana – and it needs to be “high purity”, competing directly with the needs of households and other industries.
“The next wave of investment is there. Everyone in AI servers and data centres is looking for new land to expand their facility.” he said. “The customers cannot wait.”

Layered on top of water constraints is a supply squeeze on laminates – the non-conductive, rigid base material that forms the physical foundation of circuit boards – and essential chemicals, a knock-on effect of the US-Israel war on Iran disrupting imports.
Thailand’s Board of Investment says it is exploring ways to free up more water and power, but critics argue the country is sprinting ahead of its own capacity to sustainably keep pace.
Somnuck Jongmeewasin, research director at environmental monitor and advocacy group EEC Watch, said automation had killed the jobs case for hosting PCB plants at all.
Relocation incentives meant most equipment was imported, he said, with little technology transfer or upskilling of local workers – turning Thailand into an “assembly line” for foreign capital rather than a genuine beneficiary.
“The factories that come here don’t use as much labour as they used to,” he said. “If they come from Chinese capital, they barely hire Thai workers at all. Blue collar [workers] are Myanmar, white collar are Chinese.”


Despite the scepticism, there is a more hopeful reading – one rooted less in job numbers than in opportunity.
Thailand’s education system produces precious few science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates each year and PCBs may be one of its rare growth industries suited to hiring them.
“Thailand faces a severe shortfall in meeting the surging demand for PCB and electronics workers,” said Panisa Harnpathananun of the National Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation Policy Council in Thailand.
She estimated the sector would need roughly 225,000 high-skilled workers over the next five years, against the around 1,100 electronics engineers Thai universities produced in 2024.
“This deficit is driven by an ageing population and a structural educational mismatch,” Panisa said.
Plans are afoot to close that gap, including a “sandbox” scheme to fast track engineering degrees and proposals to retrain redundant car industry workers for PCBs and semiconductors.
In a country short on other engines of growth, Panisa said PCBs might offer “the most critical opportunity and the strategic careers” its graduates were likely to find.


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Illustration: Huy Truong

A printed circuit board at a Bangkok trade fair. Thailand is Southeast Asia’s No 1 producer of PCBs and the fifth largest in the world. Photo: Aidan Jones

A printed circuit board on an assembly line. Investment in Thailand’s PCB and electronics component sector topped US$10 billion over the past three years. Photo: AFP

The Laem Chabang deep-sea port in Chonburi provides a maritime gateway to China for Thailand-based manufacturers. Photo: AFP

Workers lay cables outside a data centre in Malaysia. PCBs are fundamental to data centres’ operation, routing electrical signals and power across critical infrastructure such as servers and storage drives. Photo: Reuters

Visitors at the Thailand Electronics Circuit Asia 2026 exhibition. Photo: Aidan Jones

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A man points to a location of the data centres near his home during a protest outside Petaling Jaya City Council office outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on July 27. Photo: EPA

A man points to a location of the data centres near his home during a protest outside Petaling Jaya City Council office in Malaysia on July 27. Photo: EPA

A playground is next to a data centre construction site in Malaysia’s Johor state in May. Photo: Reuters

A worker directs traffic as a road is dug up to lay cables outside a data centre in Malaysia’s Johor state in May. Photo: Reuters

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A farmer inspects a dry river bed and paddy fields amid hot weather in Malaysia’s Johor state in 2019. Photo: Shutterstock

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Malaysia has the chips. Vietnam has the assembly lines. But Thailand’s humble circuit boards help keep the AI boom alive


Malaysia has the chips. Vietnam has the assembly lines. But Thailand’s humble circuit boards help keep the AI boom alive.


Inside Thailand’s bid to wire the world’s AI revolution

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Malaysia has the chips. Vietnam has the assembly lines. But Thailand’s humble circuit boards help keep the AI boom alive

Malaysia has the chips. Vietnam has the assembly lines. But Thailand’s humble circuit boards help keep the AI boom alive