Diamond Thermal Management Lands A Nine-Figure Angel Round

One angel round has moved diamond thermal management from "technology route" to "industry event." Wuhan Archimedes, the diamond materials and advanced packaging arm of Archimedes Semiconductor, has closed a nine-figure angel round - several hundred million RMB. The investor list carries three headline names from three different sectors: Sungrow, CATL and Xiaomi, alongside Changjiang Industrial Investment, Wuhan Hi-Tech, Wuhan Venture Capital and the Gubai Fund.

Why would a packaging-materials company with no volume production yet attract solar-storage, power-battery and consumer-electronics money at the same time?

1. Who the company is

Wuhan Archimedes was jointly established by Archimedes Semiconductor (Hefei) together with customers including Sungrow, and focuses on diamond materials and advanced packaging. The structure matters: this is not a research team that went out to raise money. Demand-side players helped found it, and capacity is being built backwards from that demand.

At almost the same moment, the company's "Diamond Inside" silicon-carbide power module completed delivery of its first official sample orders.

Capacity has a landing point too: in June 2026 the Wuhan Archimedes diamond materials and embedded-module project was approved, with planned investment of RMB 300 million and a designed annual capacity of 40,000 m².

2. Two failure points of copper

By the company's own account of the industry, average chip heat flux in advanced packaging has already passed 100 W/cm², with local hot spots exceeding 1,000 W/cm². Today's heat-spreading layer is still mostly copper, and it fails in two specific ways:

• Conductivity cannot keep up. Copper runs around 400 W/(m·K) - close to its ceiling against 1,000 W/cm² hot spots;
• CTE mismatch. The gap between copper and the chip is large, so repeated thermal cycling in AI chips generates shear stress, raising the risk of solder-joint fatigue, die cracking and delamination.

Diamond answers exactly these two: thermal conductivity above 2,000 W/(m·K), roughly five times copper, with a CTE far closer to SiC.

3. The route: not a stick-on heat spreader, a base plate

The modules now shipping use DCM packaging, with a diamond composite base plate.

That sentence is the key to the whole story. The common industry practice is an externally bonded heat spreader: the chip is finished, a high-conductivity plate is attached on top, and heat still crosses several interfaces. Wuhan Archimedes instead embeds diamond as the base plate inside the package. The conduction path from die to heatsink is redesigned, and the number of interfaces drops.

The product is compatible with existing standard packages, and the company says measured performance is more than 15% better than mainstream overseas products. All of the above are company figures and have not been independently verified.

4. The first customer is not a data center

In April 2026 the company first showed a 1,200 V ACP-3S three-level diamond power module. The module has now come off the line and shipped to a domestic electric-aircraft customer, to be installed in its propulsion system - described by the company as the first official sample order on this technical route.

Note the sequencing. Public discussion always assumes AI servers as the default application for diamond thermal management. The first formal order landed in low-altitude electric flight, where sensitivity to weight and reliability runs far higher than sensitivity to cost. A 30% weight reduction translates directly into range and payload for an eVTOL platform.

The AI data-center track remains at sampling stage: diamond composites have been sent to leading companies in PCs, AI Boxes, solar-storage, optical modules, new-energy vehicles and AIDC. Separately, a diamond multiphase ceramic for packaging is said to raise module heat dissipation and power density while reducing the number of power dies required.

5. Overseas, the same race is accelerating

In early November, Entegris announced the completion of its acquisition of Advanced Abrasives and a long-term development partnership with Element Six, aimed at accelerating the integration of diamond thermal solutions into advanced packaging for GPUs and RF devices.

The difficulty they name is the same one this Chinese route faces: bonding diamond to wafers and dies, and the interfacial thermal resistance that comes with it.

Which means the competition is no longer about how high diamond's conductivity is - that is a number in a materials handbook. It is about whether diamond can be joined to the die, the substrate and the packaging process, and joined reliably and in volume.

In one line

Three industrial giants backed a packaging-materials company with no volume production yet. What they are betting on is not the material, but whether the path of putting diamond inside the package can be made to work. And the first order going to an electric aircraft rather than a GPU suggests the adoption order may not match what most people expect.

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Disclaimer: This article is adapted and rewritten from publicly available reports on the Chinese Internet, provided for industry reference only. Funding details, technical metrics, capacity plans and customer deliveries cited herein come from public disclosures by the companies and media involved; performance figures are stated on the company's own account and have not been independently verified, and real-world results vary with package structure and operating conditions. We make no representation as to their completeness, accuracy or timeliness, and this article does not constitute investment or procurement advice. For republication or citation, please contact huicetools and credit the original source.