The Real Opportunity for Lab-Grown Diamonds

This week I turn my attention to technology and what I believe may be the real opportunity for lab-grown diamonds.

Over the weekend, I was alerted to a video by Chloe Abram. If you're not familiar with her, as I wasn't, she describes herself as a video journalist who makes optimistic explainers about technology.

Her latest video, The $1 Trillion Problem Diamonds Can Solve, attracted more than a million views in its first day. In it, she gives an easy-to-follow explanation of how lab-grown diamonds could play an important role in quantum computing, and the scale of the opportunity that presents.

As manufacturing techniques improve and producers are able to grow purer diamonds with fewer inclusions, those diamonds become better at dissipating heat. That also helps explain why natural diamonds cannot realistically serve the same purpose at scale.

As I've been rambling on over the past month about The Value of De Beers and trying to imagine what the company might look like 30 years from now, it struck me that perhaps the debate isn't simply mining versus retail, as I've been framing it. The most compelling long-term opportunity may lie in Element Six, where De Beers has quietly been researching and producing synthetic diamonds for industrial and technological applications for decades.

This blog first appeared in the June 29 Pressing Matters Executive Memo. Read the full memo here, Pressing Matters.

De Beers' synthetic diamond growing factory in oregon. (De Beers)