【Tech24H】Diamonds used to tell a love story. But over the past few years, demand for diamonds has continued to shrink, and prices have plunged repeatedly. Now, because of their extremely high heat dissipation performance, they have become hot property in the high-end AI chip arena. Data show that diamond’s room-temperature thermal conductivity is about 2,000 to 2,200 W/(m·K), five times that of copper, ten times that of aluminum, and fourteen times that of silicon. Giants such as Nvidia, Intel, and Huawei have turned their attention to this material and included it in the technology roadmap for next-generation high-power chips. Henan, with an annual output of hundreds of millions of carats and known as the “capital of synthetic diamonds”, has therefore suddenly experienced an unexpected resurgence. Since the beginning of this year, the share prices of several listed synthetic diamond companies in Henan have risen sharply. Huanghe Whirlwind hit the daily limit up at one point, while Huifeng Diamond, SF Diamond, Sinomach Precision, Liliang Diamond, and others followed with gains. The long-dormant “synthetic diamond” sector has suddenly returned to the spotlight. However, for diamond heat spreader sheets to go from a good, usable material to a “good business”, many hurdles still remain. From “proof of concept” to “small-batch supply” and then to “large-scale profit contribution”, there are still barriers such as capacity ramp-up, yield improvement, customer certification, and cost reduction. [ By Zhang Liyan | Tang Ruohan ]