The Small Layer That’s Costing APAC Billions in Tech

Across Asia-Pacific, from Singapore’s cloud data hubs and Taiwan’s chip fabs to Japan’s electric vehicle plants and India’s 5G towers, technology is scaling fast. But behind this growth, one issue quietly eats into productivity and drives up costs: heat.

Overheating devices are becoming common. AI servers throttle as CPUs cross 90°C, EV inverters lose efficiency on long drives, telecom towers see signal drops, and solar inverters underperform on hot days. This is not just a performance issue; it shortens hardware life by years, forcing costly replacements and adding to APAC’s growing e‑waste challenge. The region produced over 7 million metric tonnes of e‑waste in 2023, but less than half was recycled. That leaves millions of tonnes going unprocessed each year.

Often, the problem is not the chip or the battery. It is the thermal interface material, the thin layer that transfers heat from the device to a cooler or heatsink. Most products still use basic thermal pastes or pads, designed to be cheap and fit everything. These materials dry out, crack, or shift with thermal cycling, leaving microscopic gaps that block heat flow. Components run hotter, cooling systems work harder, and devices fail much earlier than they should.

The cost is hard to ignore.

• Large data centers with 10,000 servers in Singapore or Tokyo spend close to USD 2 million every year on extra cooling and lose another USD 5 million replacing hardware earlier than planned.

• Electric vehicles across APAC lose 8 to 10 percent of driving range because of poor thermal interfaces. Over a typical vehicle’s life, that is about USD 1,500 in lost efficiency. A 50,000‑vehicle fleet ends up with USD 75 million in avoidable costs.

• Telecom base stations, critical for 5G, drop 10 to 15 percent in performance when overheating, causing around USD 10 million in downtime and maintenance costs per 2,000 stations each year.

• Solar farms, such as a 500 MW deployment in Australia or India, can lose up to USD 3 million annually in lost energy output because their inverters are running hotter than designed.

New materials are starting to change this picture. Engineered thermal interface materials, designed with microscopic metallic structures, transfer heat many times better than conventional pastes and last through thousands of thermal cycles without breaking down. More importantly, they can be tailored for specific applications, whether that is a dense AI processor, an EV battery inverter, or a 5G radio unit.

For APAC, wider adoption of such materials could cut energy use by nearly a third across critical systems, double the usable life of key hardware, save industries billions of dollars each year, and reduce the amount of e‑waste sent to landfills.

The thermal interface market in APAC is expected to reach about USD 3 billion by 2028, growing at roughly 8 percent each year. It is no longer a background detail in the supply chain. It is becoming a strategic part of how industries protect performance, reduce costs, and meet their sustainability goals.

Paying attention to the smallest layer in a device may turn out to be one of the biggest opportunities for APAC’s next decade of growth.

— Aashish Manocha

#DeepTech #Sustainability #APACTech #Innovation