AI’s “cooling anxiety” is giving birth to a new industrial frontier. Over the past few months, several listed superhard-materials companies have announced a flurry of investment plans and changes to fund-raising projects, pivoting into the diamond heat-sink track, with some firms’ CVD diamond heat-dissipation products already in the sampling and small-batch delivery stage.

The logic is straightforward: as AI large-model iterations push server chip power consumption ever higher, traditional copper and aluminum heat sinks are approaching their physical performance ceiling. CVD diamond heat sinks — with superior thermal conductivity and electrical insulation — are seen as the key material to solve the pain point of high-power chip cooling. On the demand side, computing centers, high-power devices, and advanced packaging all require better thermal management, opening up a vast imagination space for diamond cooling.

For superhard-materials companies, this is more of a necessary transformation: with lab-grown diamond and industrial diamond businesses suffering from low prices and compressed margins, extending into semiconductor functional materials has become a pragmatic choice. The “diamond” narrative is shifting from consumer jewelry to computing infrastructure.

But the track is still in early industrialization: from sampling to volume supply, and from small batches to scale profits, there remain hurdles in process yields, cost reduction, and customer qualification. In capital markets, a crossover announcement can be issued overnight, but volume ramp-up takes years — investors should be wary of concept-chasing speculation.