Could a diamond wafer as wide as a basketball be China’s trump card in AI race?
From wedding gems to supercomputers, China’s giant synthetic diamonds may reshape the global computing competition
The gems were developed by Zhu Jiaqi and his team from HIT’s School of Astronautics using a technology that in theory could produce high-purity, single crystal diamonds of any shape and size – from wedding jewellery to a wafer as wide as a basketball.
Known as microwave plasma chemical vapour deposition (MPCVD), the process generates carbon atoms in an ultra-clean environment, depositing them layer by layer onto a diamond seed crystal.
With chip performance increasingly constrained by the more fundamental physical challenge of heat, a series of breakthroughs in the growing of large single-crystal diamonds could give China an unexpected advantage in next-generation AI hardware.
