CaratChina's lab-grown exports rise 65.3% on demand from chipmakers
Shanghai Customs data puts first-half lab-grown exports at 1.41 billion yuan, about $210 million. The growth is in thermal substrates for semiconductors, and it arrives while the jewellery reference price falls again.
§1A 65.3% number from the wrong customer.
China's lab-grown diamond exports rose 65.3% in the first half of 2026 to 1.41 billion yuan, about $210 million, on Shanghai Customs data reported through the Shanghai Diamond Exchange, the country's sole general-trade diamond platform. The dollar conversion implies about 6.71 yuan to the dollar, this desk's arithmetic on the two figures as published and offered as a check on the pair rather than as a currency quotation. The figure is nine days old as it prints here, and it is a half-year total, so it describes January to June rather than the market this morning.
The demand is not coming from jewellery. Synthetic diamond is being bought as heat spreaders and substrates in advanced semiconductors, where its thermal conductivity is roughly five times that of copper. The catalyst named in the reporting is Nvidia's announcement in February that its next-generation graphics processors would use a diamond composite material with liquid cooling as their thermal solution. That is a specification decision by a single very large buyer, and a specification decision is the kind of event that reprices an input material for everybody who makes it, not just for the buyer who made it.
§2Why a chipmaker buys a diamond.
Eighty per cent of global lab-grown production still goes to jewellery, which is the figure that keeps this in proportion: the industrial share is the minority, and so is the growth rate in absolute terms. But the two markets are supplied by the same reactors. A grower with chemical vapour deposition capacity can point it at gem rough or at a wafer-grade plate, and until this year the jewellery side was the only bidder that mattered. The one-carat lab-grown reference on this paper's tape reads $703 today on CaratRadar, down a dollar on yesterday and down from $705 on 20 August, which is the price signal the jewellery side is currently sending its growers.
Eighty per cent of global lab-grown production still goes to jewellery
§3Two signals pulling opposite ways.
Those two facts sit awkwardly together, and that is the story. Jewellery demand is telling growers the goods are worth slightly less every week. Semiconductor demand is telling the same growers that a different customer, with a different specification and a far higher tolerance for price, is arriving at 65.3% a year. Capacity that moves to the second customer stops competing with the first. This is the first mechanism anyone has identified that could take lab-grown supply out of the jewellery market without a single grower failing, and it is worth watching precisely because it does not require jewellery demand to recover.
The jewellery trade has been waiting for lab-grown prices to find a floor and has assumed the floor would come from demand. It may come from somewhere else entirely. A grower who can sell a plate into a data centre at an industrial specification does not need the engagement counter, and every unit of capacity that leaves is a unit no longer chasing the $703. Two cautions belong on that. Gem-quality growth and wafer-quality growth are not the same process and capacity does not switch overnight. And one half-year of Chinese export data at a small absolute value, $210 million, is a trend line with very few points on it. But the direction is the first genuinely good news the lab-grown supply side has had, and it arrives from an industry that has never once bought a diamond for what it looks like.
The trade, filed to your inbox before the New York open.
Prices, tenders and the one story that moved the industry overnight — read in ninety seconds.
Subscribe free →