# Could a diamond wafer as wide as a basketball be China’s trump card in AI race? > Source: > Published: 2026-06-16 04:00:06+00:00 # 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 [Chao Kong](/author/chao-kong)in Beijing [Harbin Institute of Technology](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science?module=inline&pgtype=article)(HIT) held its 11th group wedding for doctoral students on May 31, each of the 187 newlywed couples was presented with a one-carat diamond ring, with the diamonds grown in the university’s laboratory. 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. [artificial intelligence](https://www.scmp.com/news/china-future-tech/ai?module=inline&pgtype=article)race enters an era defined by computing power, China is emerging as a leading producer of ultra-large synthetic diamonds – increasingly viewed as critical to dissipating the heat generated by semiconductors. 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. [Jensen Huang](https://www.scmp.com/topics/jensen-huang?module=inline&pgtype=article)had a meeting with Zhu Yanhui, founder of Chaoying Diamond Technology, a supplier of diamond technology application materials.