GIA is known for many things: diamond grading, diamond education, and diamond devices. But what many don’t know is that it also grows diamonds.
For the last five years, in the basement of a nondescript office complex in New Jersey, GIA scientists have grown diamonds using the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method. Unlike the typical diamond producer, GIA doesn’t have a large row of reactors: It grows them one at a time, in different sizes and qualities.
It also doesn’t have any specified production target. When I ask executive vice president and chief laboratory and research officer Tom Moses how much it typically produces, he shrugs and says he is not sure.
“The most we’ve done is maybe a couple of hundred carats a year,” he says.
That’s because, unlike most producers, GIA doesn’t want to sell the diamonds. It wants to study them.
“We are trying to have as deep an understanding as we can have of the growing process,” says Moses. “So we are finding out what happens, almost in real time.”
It’s all, he says, in line with GIA’s 85-year-old mission: “To make sure the public knows what it’s getting.”
The New Jersey team mainly works on developing detection devices, including those that it markets, and proprietary ones for internal use. In its five years, the facility has become a substantial operation, which will keep growing (in every sense of the term).
“We started more as a garage shop,” says Moses. “I don’t think we are that anymore. There are a lot of very capable people with good technical backgrounds who are helping with this.”
Among those people is Dr. Jim Butler, who is one of the few people who can say he’s been growing diamonds for three decades. He started at the Naval Research Laboratory, then worked with Apollo Diamond, then became chief scientific officer at Diamond Foundry. Now, he is a consultant for GIA.
