Akash Systems brings diamond cooling technology to data hall deployments, leveraging diamond's thermal conductivity.

Pamit Surana has a trick up his sleeve. As co-founder and CCO of Akash Systems, a company specializing in diamond-based cooling for data center servers, Surana carries a diamond-shaped pebble to client meetings. When asked to explain the technology, he demonstrates its thermal conductivity by cutting through ice as if it were room-temperature butter. "The reason [the trick] got popular is because [our CEO] Felix showed it to me, and I go, 'I understand this. I'm the non-PHD, and I get it.' So now, every executive carries diamonds in their pocket," Surana explains. The trick—drawn from high school physics—illustrates diamond's viability for cooling electronics. Diamond is one of the world's most thermally conductive materials, approximately five times more conductive than copper, and Akash is betting data center operators will embrace the technology.

Felix Ejeckam, an entrepreneur and materials scientist with a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from Cornell University, founded Akash Systems around Gallium Nitride-on-Diamond (GaN-on-Diamond) technology. In 2013, Ejeckam sold the patents to Element Six, a synthetic diamond company owned by De Beers. However, after De Beers "shifted its strategy," Ejeckam and his co-founders repurchased the patents in 2016 to commercialize the technology themselves. Akash Systems was founded in 2017, with Khosla Ventures providing $3.1 million in funding the following year.

The company initially pursued space-qualified satellite radios, shipping products beginning in 2023. However, after ChatGPT's debut in November 2022, Akash identified a new opportunity. "We started to see the AI space pick up, and we saw an opportunity with the GPUs having a heat problem," Surana says. "Our heritage is solving heat on electronics, and the GPU was the next opportunity for us."

GaN-on-Diamond technology has been successfully deployed elsewhere. Fujitsu Laboratories reported in December 2019 that it used the technology for heat dissipation in weather radars and communications equipment. In February 2024, the South China Morning Post reported that Chinese scientists working for China's largest electronic warfare supplier had developed diamond-based chips for electronic weapons. Qorvo, a communications hardware firm, also offers GaN-on-Diamond wafers for military radios and amplifiers. However, Akash appears to be the first to apply this technology to data centers.

Akash's value proposition operates at two levels. At the server level, diamond's superior thermal conductivity allows chips to operate without thermal throttling, increasing compute output and tokens per watt. At the data center level, Surana notes that their "servers can operate in an environment that goes up to 120°F (48.8°C)."

"We call it diamonds in the desert," he says. "You could literally put our servers in the middle of Dubai, in the summer heat of Texas or Arizona. And we do not throttle. For air-cooled data centers, this represents a material impact in their power usage effectiveness (PUE), because now, anybody who buys our diamond cold servers can operate their data center at a higher temperature, and thus, reduce PUE, and thus open up and unlock more power out of an existing data center. That is in addition to the 70 percent at the server level."

Akash projects its cooling technology will reduce data center energy consumption and increase FLOPs/Watt by up to 15 percent per server in facilities running at temperatures up to 50°C (122°F), compared to the standard of 24-29°C (75-85°F). Surana has stated in interviews that diamond-cooled servers could generate $1 million in incremental cash over four years—approximately $250,000 per server annually—based on analysis from two major unnamed Wall Street banks.

The company gained momentum in 2024, securing a $68 million grant under the CHIPS Act, launching its first diamond-cooled servers, and signing a $27 million contract with Indian data center operator NxtGen. After NxtGen received its servers in February 2026, the company announced in March that it had launched AMD-powered diamond-cooled AI servers equipped with eight AMD Instinct MI350X GPUs, two AMD Epyc 9005 CPUs, AMD Pensando Pollara 400 AI NICs, and the latest ROCm software. Akash also announced a $300 million initial order for these AMD-powered servers in the US.

Although Akash targets all data center types eventually, its immediate strategy focuses on the air-cooled market. "The reason we deploy [at an air-cooled data center] is because you don't have to wait for a data center to be built," Surana explains. "Air-cooled data centers… those are sales that you can register today. The key is, we offer more compute today. And that's at the server level. And then in the cumulative amount, you get more in a fixed data center. So if you own an air-cooled data center, diamond will give you absolute maximum output because you don't have to build another data center. You don't have to wait for approvals. You get that today, no permit needed."

Surana identifies two primary air-cooled customer types: those ready for hardware replacement and operators seeking to maximize existing equipment. In the first case, customers purchase new servers pre-loaded with diamonds. In the second, Akash retrofits existing servers in two to three weeks. "Clients are eager to get our air-cooled options because of the headwinds of new data center construction," Surana says. "We're solving the legacy air-cooled data center constraint by unlocking a whole data center. It's not just tokens per watt in the classic sense – it's more tokens per data center, because you can densify with us."

Akash is not abandoning liquid-cooled data centers, despite their longer timelines. "Everyone's building liquid-cooled data centers," Surana notes. "But I would have to wait till 2027 or 2028 for that revenue. It's not that we're avoiding liquid, I'd rather take revenue today because 90 percent of installed bases are air-cooled. That's where the business is, and the AI market wants stuff today. So we meet the market where it is." The company plans to debut its Nvidia cooling solution in Q4 2026.

Akash emphasizes its global reach, sourcing diamonds from Asia, Europe, and the United States while planning to build domestic reactors for synthesizing artificial diamonds in America. The company remains open to opportunities across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. "Every server that is sold, we can add diamond to it, Nvidia or AMD," Surana says. "So our market is the appetite for hyperscaler, neoclouds, and enterprise. It's a really big market."

But Akash is tight-lipped about the exact cost.