Could a diamond wafer as wide as a basketball be China’s trump card in AI race?

China's Harbin Institute of Technology has developed technology to produce large synthetic diamond wafers, potentially as wide as a basketball, using microwave plasma chemical vapour deposition. These diamonds are increasingly seen as critical for heat dissipation in semiconductors, giving China an unexpected advantage in the AI hardware race.

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.