Product1 publisher3 min readPublished
Akash moves its diamond cooling pitch from satellite radios to data centre racks
Akash Systems says diamond conducts heat about five times better than copper and that its servers run without throttling at 120F ambient. The first check on that sits in an operator's own throttling telemetry.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Akash Systems executives carry a pebble-shaped diamond and cut through blocks of ice in meetings, a demonstration of thermal conductivity imported from a high school physics classroom.
- Diamond is one of the world's most thermally conductive materials, about five times more conductive than copper, its closest rival.
- Felix Ejeckam and his co-founders bought the Gallium Nitride-on-Diamond patents back from Element Six, the synthetic diamond company founded by De Beers, in 2016, after what Ejeckam describes as a strategy shift at De Beers.
- Akash's first commercial product was a space-qualified satellite radio, shipping since 2023, sold on the argument that better heat dissipation lets satellite operators get more out of the same equipment.
- Pamit Surana says Akash's servers operate in ambient environments up to 120F without thermal throttling.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint The ambient-temperature argument only pays where water cannot reach the rack. In a hall already plumbed for liquid, unthrottled compute is the only benefit left.
- precedent Radar and military amplifier programmes have already fielded the material, so a data centre buyer is underwriting yield and price at rack volume.
- capability If unthrottled chips deliver more usable compute, the purchase stops being a facilities line item and lands with capacity planning. Who signs off on it changes.
The claim an operator actually has to price sits at the server level. Akash says data centre operators get more compute out of chips they already own because those chips do not overheat into thermal throttling, and in an AI building the company frames the gain as tokens per watt [16]. Tokens per watt is measurable on a fixed workload with a meter on the rack.
The building-level claim came in Pamit Surana's own words. "We call it diamonds in the desert," he said. "You could literally put our servers in the middle of Dubai, in the summer heat of Texas or Arizona. And we do not throttle." [18] For air-cooled data centres, Surana said, that has a material impact on power usage effectiveness [19].
Datacenterdynamics does not report the price of a diamond-cooled server, the wafer cost, or a measured tokens-per-watt gain [22]. The publication writes that Akash is betting every data centre operator will want some of the material in their hardware [20].
Akash's route here ran through space. Space has no air, so satellite electronics struggle to shed heat, and that caps how fast they can transmit to Earth [23]. The GPU came next, after ChatGPT's debut in November 2022 [9]. "We started to see the AI space pick up, and we saw an opportunity with the GPUs having a heat problem," co-founder Felix Ejeckam said [10]. "Our heritage is solving heat on electronics, and the GPU was the next opportunity for us." [11]
Ten years separate the 2013 sale of the GaN-on-Diamond patents to Element Six from Akash's first shipping product [21]. Khosla Ventures put in $3.1 million the year after the 2017 founding [7].
GaN-on-diamond has been in the field for years. Fujitsu Laboratories said in December 2019 that it had used GaN-on-diamond for heat dissipation on weather radars and communications equipment [12]. The South China Morning Post reported in February 2024 that scientists working for China's largest electronic warfare weapon supplier had used diamond-based chips for electronic weapons [13]. Qorvo promotes GaN-on-diamond wafers for military radios and amplifiers [14]. Datacenterdynamics reports that Akash appears to be the first to apply the technology to data centres [15].
Two figures already in an operator's own records decide whether the meeting is worth taking. The first is GPU-hours lost to thermal throttling in the hottest month of last year; where that is near zero, the server-level claim buys nothing at any price. The second is whether water can reach the rack. A site that can plumb liquid should ask Akash for cost per watt of heat removed against the loop it would otherwise build. A site that cannot plumb water is buying an ambient ceiling, and the question there is what the ceiling costs per server against the chillers and the utility bill it replaces.
What to watch
- A published price from Akash, or a cost per watt of heat removed that an operator can set against a liquid retrofit.
- A named data centre customer, and third-party tokens-per-watt measurement on a diamond-cooled server against a standard one.
- Funding beyond the $3.1 million Khosla round. Wafer volume for rack-scale orders would require it.