On May 31, the 11th doctoral student group wedding of Harbin Institute of Technology was held. For this wedding, the school prepared diamond rings made of 1-carat "True Heart" diamonds, which were developed by Professor Zhu Jiaqi's team. These diamonds added a unique, hardcore romance to the wedding.
It is reported that this diamond has extremely high hardness and chemical stability. The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post also reported on June 16th that the technology used by the team theoretically allows for the creation of high-purity single crystal diamonds in various shapes and sizes, suitable for use from wedding jewelry to wafers that are nearly as wide as a basketball.
This technology is known as Microwave Plasma Chemical Vapor Deposition (MPCVD). It generates carbon atoms in a ultra-clean environment and deposits them layer by layer on diamond seeds. This technology has received various awards at home and abroad, including the National Technological Invention Second Prize, Heilongjiang Provincial Technological Invention First Prize, China Patent Gold Award, Heilongjiang Provincial Patent Gold Award, and the Geneva International Invention Exhibition Gold Award. The impact of this technology extends far beyond the weddings of these new couples.
The report emphasizes that as the global AI competition enters an era dominated by computing power, China is emerging as a major producer of ultrafine synthetic diamonds. This material is increasingly seen as crucial for solving semiconductor heat dissipation problems.
In fact, chip performance is increasingly constrained by a fundamental physical problem related to heat dissipation. However, a series of breakthroughs in large-size single-crystal diamond cultivation technology could potentially give China unexpected advantages in the field of next-generation AI hardware.
On July 9, 2025, a family-owned artificial diamond enterprise in Zhecheng, Henan, experienced both thriving production and sales of diamonds. Zhecheng is known as the “Diamond Capital” of Henan. Official data shows that Zhecheng County produces 6 billion carats of single diamond crystals and 15 billion carats of diamond micropowder annually. The picture shows finished artificial diamonds attracting consumers for viewing. Photo by Wang Zhongju, provided by IC Photo.
In January this year, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang met with Zhu Yanhui, the founder of Chuangxin Diamond Technology, a supplier of materials for diamond technology applications, during his visit to China.
At the CES International Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas, USA at the beginning of January this year, NVIDIA announced that it will gradually phase out traditional cooling solutions in its next-generation GPUs. This marks a new stage in the development of computing hardware.
To meet the rapidly growing demand for energy and water resources in the AI field, NVIDIA has adopted a thermal management system that combines diamond-copper composite materials with liquid cooling technology.
Traditional methods of producing artificial diamond are typically limited to sizes of a few millimeters. However, Chinese researchers have successfully increased the size of crystals to 6 inches (15.2 centimeters), and recently they have further increased it to 8 inches (20.3 centimeters).
On February 28 this year, China's first large-scale commercial manufacturing base for super-large diamond thermal management materials was officially put into operation at Henan Fengyouchuang Material Technology Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Huanghe Xuanchuan Co., Ltd. located in Changge City, Henan Province.
This historic diamond company also holds shares in Superwin Diamond Technology. It is currently producing 8-inch diamond heat sinks, which have a diameter of about 20.3 centimeters, slightly smaller than the diameter of a standard 24-centimeter basketball.
This heat spreader is designed to be installed above the area where the chip generates the most heat, serving as a fundamental heat conduction layer. For AI processors that integrate billions of transistors in increasingly compact spaces, effective heat management becomes crucial.
The Nianhua Early News described this achievement as reflecting the extensive collaboration between China’s scientific research and manufacturing capabilities. It has formed a complete domestic industrial ecosystem that encompasses equipment, materials, manufacturing, and application deployment.
Among them, Harbin Institute of Technology provided most of the underlying technologies, including optimizing the MPCVD growth process and increasing the crystal size. At the same time, a diamond engineering team from China National Machinery Industry Group Corporation (CNIM) successfully solved a long-standing problem in the industry: wafer warping.
According to the Science and Technology Daily, engineers have optimized the powder formula and pressing process conditions, allowing the deformation of diamond heat sinks to be controlled at the micron level, thereby achieving precise integration with semiconductor devices.
Nanjing Ruiwei New Material Technology Co., Ltd. has successfully addressed another key challenge—the combination of diamond and copper. Due to poor chemical compatibility, these two materials naturally do not bond together.
After days of testing, debugging, and improvement, the team successfully developed a new combination of ingredients. They adopted innovative surface metallization modifications and copper-based alloying designs, which reduced the interface thermal resistance by 80%, ensuring strong adhesion between diamond and copper.
Relying on these technologies, the team at Henan Carbon Core Materials Technology Co., Ltd. has achieved practical mass production of this technology. This domestic chip "heat dissipation patch" has completely shed the label of a "laboratory product", transforming laboratory prototypes into heat management products that can be produced on a large scale.
Diamond/Copper Heat Dissipation Components - Henan Carbon Core Materials Technology Co., Ltd.
Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturers have also developed domestic MPCVD equipment, reducing their dependence on imported systems and establishing an industrial supply chain that is largely self-sufficient.
As the power consumption of next-generation AI accelerators and high-density computing clusters continues to rise, the AI industry is facing an increasingly severe challenge in heat dissipation.
Chen Yupeng, General Manager of the National Machinery Diamond Market Support Center, stated that the thermal conductivity of copper, a current mainstream heat dissipation material, is only about 400W/(m·K). Under high heat flux conditions, it is very easy to cause 'heat accumulation'. Long-term operation can lead to chip warping, cracking, and even failure, becoming a 'stumbling block' to computing power upgrades.
Who can replace copper? Sun Zhaoda, the secretary-general of the Superhard Materials Branch of the China Machine Tool and Tool Industry Association, explained that diamond, with its ultra-high thermal conductivity of 2000—2200W/(m·K), and its thermal expansion coefficient that is highly compatible with third-generation semiconductors such as SiC and GaN, becomes the optimal solution for breaking the heat dissipation bottleneck in computing devices.
Moreover, diamond coolers possess highly compatible thermal expansion characteristics with gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC), thereby reducing mechanical stress and enhancing reliability.
As diamond-based cooling technology moves from the laboratory to commercial applications, its potential areas of application include AI servers, chiplet packaging, gallium nitride electronic devices, and high-density AI computing clusters. With this technology adopted by China, it is possible to achieve a performance improvement of approximately 10%.
