Chinese Researchers Develop Advanced Diamond Growth Technology for AI Hardware

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.