SemiconductorsDiamond Foundry creates first 200mm single-crystal diamond wafer for AI chip cooling
Diamond Foundry has built a 200-millimetre single-crystal diamond substrate designed to cool high-power artificial intelligence processors.
SemiconductorsIn brief: Diamond Foundry announced on 6 November 2026 in San Francisco that it has produced the world's first 200mm single-crystal diamond wafer. Measuring 200 millimetres across, the substrate conducts heat at least five times better than copper to cool artificial intelligence processors.
Diamond Foundry Inc. announced on 6 November 2026 in San Francisco that it has produced the world's first 200mm single-crystal diamond wafer. Chief Executive Officer Martin Roscheisen presented the D200mm crystal, which measures 200 millimetres in diameter, during a video keynote at CarbonSemi 2026 in Ningbo, China. The company built the substrate to help cool artificial intelligence (AI) processors and other high-power semiconductors.
Thermal limits in chip manufacturing
Modern AI processors concentrate high levels of power into microscopic silicon regions, creating severe thermal problems that conventional materials struggle to manage. Diamond conducts heat at least five times better than copper while remaining an electrical insulator, which helps spread heat at the material level and reduce hotspots. Unlike polycrystalline diamond or an assembly of individual diamond pieces, the new substrate is a continuous single-crystal diamond (SCD) piece.
Natural diamonds are constrained in size by geology, while conventional lab-grown crystals have historically remained small. That size bottleneck has limited the material's use in high-power electronics, AI computing, optics, and quantum systems despite its mechanical strength and optical properties. At 200 millimetres across, Diamond Foundry's SCD matches the wafer size that semiconductor fabs use for older manufacturing processes. The company is working to turn SCD from a scarce gemstone material into an industrial semiconductor substrate manufactured at scale.
Twenty-five years of crystal growth research
Diamond Foundry was founded in San Francisco in 2012, building on scientific work that began in the early 2000s. Stefan Gsell and Martin Fischer spent 25 years pursuing the challenge of growing scalable SCD. Producing the D200mm crystal required advances in crystal growth, plasma physics, growth chemistry, reactor engineering, materials science, thermal management, metrology, process control, and automation.
"This is one of those milestones that once seemed almost impossible," Roscheisen said. "Hundreds of DF engineers, scientists, and technicians contributed to us getting here. It is the accumulated result of countless experiments, failures, inventions, rebuilt machines, and insights over more than a decade." Roscheisen said Gsell and Fischer kept going for 25 years when the prevailing view was that SCD could not be made at this scale. He said the diamond exists because hundreds of people contributed and a few refused to give up on the idea.
Wider industry push into diamond cooling
Other companies have also pursued lab-grown diamonds for semiconductor cooling. Akash Systems won $18.2 million in 2024 CHIPS Act funding to fuse Gallium Nitride (GaN) with synthetic diamond. The De Beers Group, known for its African diamond mines, is building a copper-plated diamond composite to cool AI, high-performance computing, and GaN RF devices. Solid-state cooler maker Frore Systems is also developing diamond-infused watercooling cold plates for Nvidia's next-generation AI GPUs.
What happens next
The first D200mm crystal shown by Diamond Foundry remains unpolished from the growth process, so it needs further processing before chipmakers can use it. A company graph indicates that creating a D300mm SCD wafer is possible before 2030, matching the wafer size used in leading node processes. Roscheisen said the D200mm result makes D300mm predictable. Diamond Foundry is also scaling volume production of chip substrates through a $2.77 billion EU Chips Act project in Spain.
Sources: Tom's Hardware, PR Newswire, TechPowerUp
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