Middle-east Arab News Opinion | Asharq Al-awsat

Diamond ‘Cultivation’: A Revolution by Silicon Valley | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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Pink and Colourless Grown Diamonds by IIa Technologies that
have been cut and polished for use in the Luxury sector. Photo: Ila
Technologies


London- The diamond market witnesses an exceptional revolution with the emergence of synthetic diamond industry known as “diamond cultivation”. This revolution was launched by the US Silicon Valley, where labs allocated huge investments to produce complete diamonds from gases and carbon particles.

According to experts, the first production had an exceptional quality regarding clarity, color, weight, light reflection, and solidity levels.

Experts in Brussels said that while the natural gem requires millions of years to be formed, the synthetic diamond requires only four weeks. The promising results of the first experience encouraged one of Twitter’s biggest investors, Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, and many others to invest huge sums in this industry. Expert said that marketing these diamonds has been very motivating, as the synthetic diamond cost are lower; they also expected production costs to see an additional drop with technologies imitating the same environment in which forms the natural diamond.

Jewelry merchants note that producers of synthetic gems use many arguments to promote their products, and focus on the moral side, as the natural diamond extraction damages environment and exploit children.

On the other hand, producers also highly count on industries using diamonds as a primary material to manufacture products like natural electric isolators and thermal conductors. All these industries are expected to prefer synthetic diamonds because of their lower cost.

Investors of Silicon Valley also see that the natural production of diamonds has reached its peak, and that it started to regress by 2% annually because of exhaustion of mines.

A report by Morgan Stanley Company expected the industrial diamond industry to acquire 7.5% of the market by 2020.
Over the past years, this sector saw major changes, as many small companies entered to play a role in supplying raw diamond worldwide. According to major merchants, the emergence of synthetic diamonds labs led raw diamond sales to drop sharply.