China Securities Co., Ltd.: Short-term diamond copper composite material technology has high maturity, outstanding cost performance in industrialization, and is expected to take the lead in production.

China Securities Co., Ltd. released a research report that stated that diamond, with its super high thermal conductivity (up to 2000W/mK) and low thermal expansion coefficient, has already been applied in high-performance consumer electronics and AI servers with composite materials. Looking ahead, 1) in the short term, diamond-copper composite materials (600-800W, cost only 10%-20% of pure diamond, according to industry research) have high technical maturity and industrial cost-effectiveness, suitable for packaging covers and cold plates/microchannels, and are expected to be mass-produced first; 2) in the medium term, multi-crystal diamond heat sinks bonded to chips, with the key breakthrough point being surface smoothness and curl control, are expected to mature further in the next 1-3 years; 3) in the long term, single-crystal diamond wafers are directly bonded to chip substrates, but limited by size and cost, are still in the stage of technical exploration. In terms of industry value in the coming years, the key lies in the high technical difficulty of producing MPCVD equipment that can produce 8-inch multi-crystal diamonds and bonding equipment, and the sector opportunity mainly focuses on the progress of end manufacturers' diamond heat dissipation solutions. The main points of China Securities Co., Ltd. are as follows: Why is diamond considered the ultimate heat dissipation material? The transfer of heat from the chip die layer to the atmosphere usually requires collaborative heat dissipation through heat dissipation materials (TIM/metal heat-conducting materials) and heat dissipation technologies (air cooling/heat pipes/liquid cooling, etc.). With the increasing demand for computing power, chip power density and integration level are constantly increasing, resulting in a sharp rise in heat generation per unit area. While fluid cooling may continue in the heat transfer process, the efficiency of heat conduction from within the chip needs to be further improved. Diamond, with its much higher thermal conductivity than copper and aluminum (up to 2000W/mK) and low thermal expansion coefficient, becomes an ideal material to break through the bottleneck of chip heat dissipation. The future iterative path of diamond heat dissipation: in the short term, the main focus is on diamond composite materials; in the medium term, large-size diamond heat sinks are considered; in the long term, the technical breakthrough direction is single-crystal diamond substrates. The architecture of diamond for heat dissipation includes chip-level (internal bonding/chip bonding), package-level (packaging layer), board-level (microchannels), and system-level (external system), each of which is a superposed relationship, and the supporting processes include mounting, heat sink bonding, and wafer bonding. Product types include diamond composite materials, polycrystalline heat sinks, and single-crystal diamond, among which: 1) diamond composite materials: made by sintering diamond micro-powder with a metal substrate, although there are difficulties in controlling interface thermal resistance, the cost-effective advantage is excellent, and the thermal conductivity is much higher than that of copper metal, which can be used for packaging (heat dissipation cover) and board-level (cold plates/microchannels) heat dissipation. It has the highest degree of commercial maturity and the fastest subsequent mass production; 2) polycrystalline diamond: directly bonded to the chip using bonding technology, with key difficulties lying in slow CVD growth in the manufacturing process, grain boundary scattering, extreme difficulty in processing, and subsequent integration difficulties in interface bonding and process compatibility, especially for sizes above 8 inches; 3) single-crystal diamond: with a thermal conductivity that can exceed 2000W/mK, it can be directly used as a native substrate for silicon and gallium nitride chips, restructuring the chip's thermal resistance distribution from the bottom. However, it is constrained by the high cost of raw materials and preparation, as well as the bottleneck of large-size MPCVD mass production process. Currently, only experimental samples of 8-inch single crystals are available, indicating a future breakthrough direction for the industry. Currently, diamond composite material heat dissipation has been commercially applied in high-end consumer electronics and server fields. Diamond heat dissipation has already been applied in the heat dissipation areas of 3C consumer electronics and AI servers, such as: in April 2026, SUGON DATA ENERGY launched the world's first MW-level phase-change submerged liquid-cooled whole machine cabinet C8000 V3.0 (diamond-copper microchannel product), in May 2026, Lenovo YOGA Air14 Ultra laptop (diamond-copper heat dissipation); in May 2026, Weiyin Technology exhibited diamond composite material micro-channel liquid-cooled cold plate, which will be the standard heat dissipation solution for NVIDIA's new generation Vera Rubin NVL72 AI server platform; in March 2026, Akash released the world's first diamond-cooled AI server equipped with AMD Instinct MI350X GPU, directly using diamond heat sinks for the heat conduction of the GPU and HBM high-bandwidth memory. Domestic capacity is continuously expanding, and MPCVD equipment is one of the key factors in the scaled production of diamond heat dissipation. The core of the sector opportunity lies in observing the future evolution of heat dissipation solutions of end manufacturers. Domestic manufacturers continue to increase capacity construction and process iteration, with the main focus currently on diamond-copper composite materials and medium to small-size polycrystalline diamond heat sinks. There are multiple difficulties in the large-scale implementation of 8-inch wafers in MPCVD, with constraints such as the physical mechanisms of microwave resonance in the growth process, challenges in achieving uniformity in large plasma chambers, and the difficulty of maintaining a stable growth rate. The current domestically produced equipment has a cost advantage in the 2-4 inch polycrystalline field, and the key technological challenge lies in achieving uniformity in microwave power supplies and plasma distribution, with significant delays in the progress of large single-crystal diamond preparation compared to overseas counterparts. In addition, the post-processing bonding of diamond is also an important step for the subsequent application of diamond heat sinks. With the increase in GPU power consumption, the future focus will be on the progress of top-tier end manufacturers like NVIDIA in the introduction of diamond-copper and polycrystalline diamond heat dissipation solutions.