AWS' Center for Quantum Networking partners with De Beers' Element Six division to grow artificial diamonds, hoping they can revolutionize computer networks
Amazon.com Inc. is teaming up with a unit of De Beers Group to grow artificial diamonds, betting that custom-made gems could could help revolutionize computer networks. Tweets: @quinnypig Tweets: @quinnypig : In fairness @awscloud networking has always been priced this way. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This partnership is the next rung in a ladder Amazon has been climbing for years: after the Braket preview that put D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti machines on AWS and the [[a:972219|Caltech quantum computing center launched alongside US, Chinese, IBM, Microsoft, and Google efforts]], the company is now reaching below software and services into the physical substrate — teaming with De Beers' Element Six, which has long supplied diamonds for satellite chips, to grow artificial diamonds purpose-built for computer networks.
What makes this more than an odd-couple pairing is how quickly synthetic diamond has become a multi-use compute material: researchers are exploring synthetic diamonds to cool AI data center chips, startups like Quantum Brilliance are building room-temperature diamond-qubit hardware, and labs are engineering tiny imperfections into diamonds to turn them into quantum sensors for medicine and brain-computer interfaces. AWS is securing its own supply at the source.
First-order effects
- Element Six gains a marquee hyperscaler customer for its lab-grown diamond business, extending it beyond satellite-chip supply into quantum networking components built to AWS' specifications.
- AWS' Center for Quantum Networking moves from research-center status toward owning a proprietary materials pipeline its Braket customers and internal network teams can't get elsewhere.
Second-order effects
- Rival quantum programs at IBM, Microsoft, and Google — all named in the same race AWS joined at Caltech — face pressure to lock up their own exotic-materials supply chains rather than rely on commodity vendors.
- Synthetic-diamond producers serving adjacent uses, from chip cooling to room-temperature qubit hardware like Quantum Brilliance's, see demand-side validation that could tighten availability and raise prices for the shared material.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, cloud infrastructure competition extends downward from chips and data centers to engineered materials, with hyperscalers contracting directly with specialized manufacturers the way they once contracted for silicon.
- De Beers' industrial arm becomes progressively decoupled from the gem business, positioning Element Six as a strategic supplier whose valuation rests on computing demand rather than jewelry cycles.
The trend: Cloud providers are vertically integrating down to the materials layer, as synthetic diamonds emerge as a dual-use input spanning quantum networking, chip cooling, qubits, and sensing.