Diamonds Revolutionizing Chip Manufacturing: What It Means for Tech Investors and Businesses
With technology companies in a race to build data centers housing servers powered by the latest artificial intelligence models, the electricity consumption of these facilities is soaring. However, the majority of this electricity does not power computing tasks but is wasted as heat emanating from the billions of transistors on modern chips.
R. Martin Roscheisen, an electrical engineer and entrepreneur at Diamond Foundry in South San Francisco, revealed, “The dirty secret in chips is that more than half of all energy is wasted as leakage current at the transistor level.” This wasteful heat not only represents a significant loss of energy but also shortens chip longevity and reduces efficiency, generating even more heat. As a result, maintaining the temperature of servers in data centers is critical for optimal performance.
To tackle this issue, engineers, including Roscheisen, are innovating by embedding tiny synthetic diamond pieces into chips to enhance cooling. Diamonds are not only the hardest known material but also excel at heat conduction. Paul May, a physical chemist at the University of Bristol, stated, “Most people do not realize that diamond has the best heat-conduction properties of any material.” He added that diamond’s heat conduction significantly surpasses that of copper, a common heat sink material.
Diamond’s exceptional thermal conductivity stems from its atomic structure: each carbon atom bonds strongly with four neighbors, creating a sturdy lattice that efficiently carries heat vibrations through the crystal. As May noted, “High-end electronics already use diamond heat-spreaders, and soon processors in everyday devices like PCs and smartphones will likely feature them.”
Recently, Roscheisen’s company focused on producing single-crystal diamond layers for silicon wafers, which cool better than multi-crystal arrays but are more challenging and costly to manufacture. Meanwhile, Element Six, owned by De Beers, has long supplied diamonds for industrial uses, including cooling chips in radio communication devices and satellites. Now, it is targeting the computer chip market.
Bruce Bolliger, head of business development at Element Six, emphasized that the thermal requirements of next-generation AI and high-performance computing are fuelling renewed interest in advanced cooling technologies. In January, the company introduced a diamond-copper hybrid material designed to outperform copper alone in heat conduction while being more affordable than pure diamond. Bolliger stated this composite offers an “optimal thermal management solution” that could enable chips to run faster, last longer, and reduce data center cooling costs.
At Stanford University, electrical engineer Srabanti Chowdhury is exploring diamond to develop more powerful computer chips. Traditional methods of boosting chip speed by shrinking transistors and packing more onto silicon wafers face physical limitations. Stacking transistors in layers increases heat challenges further.
Chowdhury’s team aims to channel heat away using polycrystalline diamond layers, which are easier to manufacture than single crystals but face challenges as their typical vertical crystal orientation hampers horizontal heat flow—essential for flat chips. Additionally, diamond growth typically requires temperatures above 1,300°F, which damages silicon substrates. Attempts to deposit diamond at lower temperatures have struggled with crystal formation.
Funded partly by DARPA, the U.S. Defense Department’s research arm, this work holds promise. Mechanical engineer Yogendra Joshi of Georgia Tech and DARPA noted that combining low-temperature diamond growth with other cooling methods could unlock computing capabilities currently out of reach.
Chowdhury highlighted the urgency of addressing heat management amid AI’s rapid expansion, describing the challenge as both longstanding and newly critical: “The problem of heat was already there, but now that the growth really came with AI, it’s like a hockey stick — we see this problem growing very big. I have not seen anything that was so important so quickly.”
—The New York Times
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The rapid growth of AI and high-performance computing is drastically increasing data center energy consumption, with heat dissipation becoming a critical bottleneck. For businesses in Oman’s tech and data sectors, investing in advanced cooling technologies like diamond-based heat spreaders presents a significant opportunity to enhance efficiency and reduce operational costs. Smart investors and entrepreneurs should consider backing innovations that address thermal management challenges, as these solutions will be vital in sustaining the next wave of AI-driven growth and could position Oman as a competitive player in the emerging global tech infrastructure market.
