Data centers are among the most contentious projects in tech construction. Their energy use, construction costs, and siting are under close scrutiny from regulators, utilities, and the communities that host them. Amid these political and social complications, one fact is universally accepted: a data center converts electricity into computation and heat, and cooling accounts for roughly 25% to 40% of its total energy consumption.
What is often overlooked, however, is where the cooling requirement is actually set. It is not determined by the machine room environment but by the chip package itself.
Advanced packaging makes it possible to concentrate more power on a smaller area of silicon. Through chiplets, stacked high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and kilowatt-class multi-die modules, the per-package power of flagship accelerators has passed 1,000 W, rack densities have exceeded 100 kW, and vendor roadmaps already include 200 kW rack designs. Before heat reaches a cold plate, a cooling loop, or a chiller, every watt must first cross the initial millimeter above the junction. If heat is not efficiently conducted out of the die as it leaves, no downstream cooling system can recover that loss.
This is why the material at the top of the stack needs to change. Single-crystal diamond, with a thermal conductivity above 2,000 W/m·K (about five times that of copper), serves as a die-sized heat-spreading layer placed right next to the junction. It directly reduces spreading resistance at the exact location that determines the thermal budget. While embracing artificial intelligence (AI), tech leaders are also well aware of a major barrier to its broad adoption: the enormous heat and energy consumption generated at the chip level is amplified further at data center scale. The entry point for solving this problem is the chip itself.
