Since the beginning of the year, the market value of the core targets of the superhard materials track (Sifangda, Huanghe Tornado, Huifeng Diamond, Power Diamond, and Wald) has doubled, or is close to doubling, on average.
It is worth mentioning that another subject in the industry that has attracted widespread attention from investors – cultivated diamonds – was fermented last year, and these targets are basically rising.
But in just two years, the narrative logic has changed.
What will be traded in 2025 is “export control” and “price increase chain”. With the financial turning point in the first quarter, the sector is in the stage of rebounding from the bottom.
At this time, a powerful catalytic logic is waiting.
Starting from 2026, the overall narrative of the track will switch to “AI heat dissipation” – overseas computing power solutions, supercomputing implementation, and the redirection of raised funds to heat dissipation materials.
Did diamond really change fate against the will of heaven?
01、AI new bottleneck
The next level of AI computing power is not in the manufacturing process, but in heat dissipation.
And the bottleneck of heat dissipation,It is moving from system-level heat exchange to local hot spots on the chip.
NVIDIA GPU single-chip power consumption has climbed from 400W for the A100 in 2020 to 700W for the H100 in 2022 and 1000W for the B200 in 2024. The Rubin architecture will further increase to more than 1200W in 2026. The planned single-chip power consumption of the Feynman architecture in 2028 is expected to exceed 2000W.
GPU power consumption has been rising, and heat dissipation has changed from a supporting project to a prerequisite for computing power expansion. The focus of competition has also shifted from the cooling system to the heat dissipation material itself.
As we have emphasized in past articles, the era of air cooling is over. Liquid cooling is already a standard feature of AI servers, but it only covers the packaging shell and cannot control the inside of the chip.
Liquid cooling solves system-level heat exchange. What really determines the difficulty of heat dissipation is not the total power consumption, but the local heat flow density. The heat flow density at the hot spot of the AI chip has reached 1000-2500 W/cm². This level has spanned from the nuclear reactor energy level to the solar surface energy level, completely exceeding the upper limits of traditional air cooling, copper liquid cooling plates and even two-phase liquid cooling solutions.
This means,No matter how strong the liquid cooling is, it can only take away the heat that has been transferred to the package shell.However, under such a high local heat flux density, the heat does not have time to diffuse laterally from the local hot spots inside the chip, and it accumulates sharply near the junction interface.
The thermal conductivity of traditional copper-based heat dissipation materials cannot achieve fast enough lateral heat diffusion at the near-junction interface of the chip. This is not a problem that can be solved by optimizing the cooling solution. The problem is not how to cool down, but what materials to use to cool down.
The material system is time to be updated.
Diamond is the material with the highest thermal conductivity known in nature. The room temperature thermal conductivity reaches 2000-2200W/m·K, which is 5 to 6 times that of copper and more than 9 times that of aluminum. At the same time, the thermal expansion coefficient of diamond is about 1.0-1.2×10⁻⁶/K, which is highly matched with mainstream semiconductor materials such as silicon, GaN, and SiC. It also has excellent insulation properties and can be directly contacted with the chip.
It can be said that diamond has almost no substitutes for its combination of “high thermal conductivity + low thermal stress + electrical compatibility”.
The market once priced diamond heat dissipation as the ultimate solution for AI chip heat dissipation., the endorsement of giants such as NVIDIA has provided a catalyst for the entire concept to make waves in A-shares.
At CES in January 2026, NVIDIA officially announced that the next generation Vera Rubin architecture GPU will fully adopt the “diamond copper composite heat dissipation + 45°C warm water direct liquid cooling” solution. In July, Huang Renxun confirmed that Vera Rubin has been put into production, with a single GPU power consumption of 2300W.
Intel CEO Chen Liwu has also mentioned the importance of diamond heat dissipation in public, announcing his investment in a synthetic diamond wafer company, and is optimistic about the application potential of diamond as a heat dissipation material in the field of chip packaging.
According to data from Puhua Youce, the overall global server liquid cooling market space will grow from US$12.57 billion in 2026 to US$53.51 billion in 2030. Assuming that the value of diamond heat dissipation accounts for 10% of the liquid cooling market in 2030, the market size will be US$5.4 billion.
In addition to being a heat dissipation material, diamond also has a layer of use that is closely related to the AI industry chain——PCB drill needle.
The upgrade of AI computing power drives the PCB industry to upgrade from the number of layers to the material system. The advantages of high-end PCB materials in hardness and wear resistance have put forward higher requirements for the service life of drill bits.
The logic is similar to heat dissipation, and diamond drill bits are expected to transform from optional tools to necessary processing tools for high-end PCBs. The unit price of diamond drill needles is as high as 1,500-2,000 yuan/piece, which is dozens of times that of traditional tungsten steel drill needles. The number of drilled holes is also far wider than that of traditional tungsten steel drill needles. The entire market has great room for expansion.
Diamonds will most likely become a profitable business.
Whether it is diamond heat dissipation or drill needles, in the current AI industry landscape, the cost ratio is actually negligible. However, based on the very expensive computing power nodes, no factory dares to bear the risk of scrapping a motherboard in order to save a few dollars in consumable costs.
But for suppliers, the only demand of downstream manufacturers is “absolute yield and absolute reliability.”
This creates a relatively high time and verification barrier, which means that once the quality test is passed, competitors who are not on the whitelist will not be able to shake their share even if they significantly reduce their prices.
The industrial logic is clear, and the next question is:What step has the application level actually taken, and when will the supply-side orders be released?
02、Cutting in on the application side and expanding production on the supply side
Diamond heat dissipation is indeed moving from the laboratory to the production line, but the pace is uneven. Significant deliveries have already occurred on the application side, and the supply side is actively expanding production, while most links are still in the sample delivery and small batch verification stages.
A real watershed,It depends on who can pass the yield, cost and batch orders first.
On the application side, from February to March this year, some overseas companies have taken the lead in completing the delivery of the first batch of servers equipped with diamond cooling, and they also cover the two major computing platforms of NVIDIA and AMD.
Now the global industrial chain is accelerating the supply of semiconductor-grade diamond. American and Japanese companies are basically ahead in scale production and orders. This year, they also plan to promote the commercialization of large-size diamond substrates and reduce the cost of using diamond materials for a single GPU.
The domestic latecomer advantage lies in the fact that the global dominance and large-scale supply of the synthetic diamond industry provide raw materials, equipment, talents and industrial supporting foundations for the development of functional diamonds. Accelerating the transformation of production capacity to such high-end applications can reduce large-scale costs more quickly.
my country’s synthetic diamond production accounts for more than 90% of the world’s total production, all key special equipment are independently controllable. In the past few years, the shrinking demand for diamonds and the expansion of low-end production capacity in the industry have caused the price of synthetic diamonds to collapse.
In October 2025, the Ministry of Commerce launched a diamond export control policy to form full-chain control from equipment, materials to technology. In the long term, regulatory policies will have a positive effect in forcing low-end production capacity to be cleared, helping leading companies transform into high-end application links, and promoting the high-end industry.
In the first half of the year, many diamond companies such as Zhongnan Diamond, Huifeng Diamond, Houde Diamond, and Jiangxi Hengzhuan issued intensive price adjustment notices. Starting from March 1, 2026, Huifeng Diamond will increase the prices of related products by 5%-15%.
Looking at the industrialization pace of diamond heat dissipation in China, superhard material companies such as Sinomach Seiko, Sifangda, Huifeng Diamond, Huanghe Tornado, and Power Diamond have all laid out their plans in this direction, and have made progress in product routes, production capacity planning, and downstream verification.
Downstream domestic supercomputing applications are advancing. Huawei has launched the “Tao’s Law V2” solution. For high-power stacking scenarios such as Ascend AI chips, CVD diamond heat dissipation layers are added to the upper and lower layers of the package, combined with micron-level liquid cooling channels between layers, to form an active heat dissipation structure.
One of its core suppliers is Huanghe Tornado. In February this year, the first 8-inch diamond heat sink wafer production line of Henan Fengyouchuang, a subsidiary of Huanghe Tornado, was put into operation in Henan, with an annual output of 20,000 wafers. In August, Fengyouchuang signed a sales contract for single crystal diamond heat sink wafers with leading overseas companies, officially entering the top international semiconductor supply chain.
According to incomplete statistics, as of the end of August, five listed superhard materials companies, including Power Diamond, Sifangda, Huanghe Tornado, Huifeng Diamond, and Wald, had involved a total capital scale of over 6 billion yuan through private placement plans, changes in the use of raised funds, and external investments.
From the perspective of investment direction, it is mainly used to develop functional materials, precision tools, and replenish working capital. Some projects have even been established for a long time. The timing of the adjustment coincides with the future demand for diamond materials for AI heat dissipation and PCB drill bits.
For example, the Power Diamond project has been established in 2022. At first, cultivated diamonds were still the mainstream on the track, but now they have turned to the diamond field in time. There is also a fixed increase of 2 billion yuan from Sifangda, of which 1.76 billion yuan is invested in the industrialization of diamond drill bits. The total investment of the project is 1.846 billion yuan, the construction period is 36 months, and after completion, it can produce 7.1 million diamond drill bits annually.
Put together, it can be seen that diamond functional materials and high value-added precision processing tools are becoming a new direction. This round of direction is driven by the two major needs of AI computing power heat dissipation and semiconductor precision processing, and its effects will be gradually realized in the next two to three years.
As related projects have been implemented one after another, some listed companies’ diamond cooling products have entered the stage of sample delivery and small batch supply.
Wald is one of the few companies in China that masters the three major processes of CVD (MPCVD, hot wire, and DC arc). It has now achieved the manufacturing of diamond heat sinks with a maximum size of 320mm*320mm and is compatible with mainstream wafer sizes of 50mm-300mm in diameter, and has begun delivery to customers for verification.
03、尾聲
Then again, judging from the current industrial process, diamond heat dissipation is still in its early stages.階段。There are already commercial products,Large-scale procurement and entering into AI servers are two things that need to be verified separately.
The liquid cooling penetration rate has increased, and it cannot be directly concluded that diamond will be used in every cold plate. Because only when the new performance can cover the cost, processing and reliability requirements, customers will be motivated to introduce it. Therefore, do not linearly extrapolate the current growth rate. Because the growth curve is steep, you think the valuation is still cheap.
But what the capital market is obsessed with is actually a narrative miracle of using “old production capacity” to save “new bottlenecks”.
From optical modules to PCBs, liquid cooling and diamonds, the early hype logic of funds in these segments is extremely unified: it is not just unattainable new technologies that can really detonate the market, but those companies that have mature production capacity and accurately block the most deadly throat of AI evolution.
The left hand is using production capacity to block the new throat of AI, and obtaining a high technology premium; the right hand is the old track experiencing a price rebound due to the clearing of supply.
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