Why diamonds are a computer chip's new best friend

With tech companies racing to build more data centers housing servers that run the latest AI models, the amount of electricity these facilities consume is skyrocketing.

- AMOS ZEEBERG

But most of that electricity doesn't power computing at all. It is squandered in the crudest way: as heat, spilling out of every one of the hundreds of billions of transistors in a modern chip.

"The dirty secret in chips is that more than half of all energy is wasted as leakage current at the transistor level," said R Martin Roscheisen, an electrical engineer and entrepreneur at Diamond Foundry, a company in South San Francisco that manufactures specialized diamonds for use in electronics.

This heat is a great waste of energy that significantly shortens a chip's life and makes it run less efficiently, generating still more wasteful heat. Consequently, one of the critical tasks in data centers is keeping the temperature of servers down so they can run smoothly.