A Mountain View startup building chips out of lab-grown diamond has picked Petaluma for its first major manufacturing outpost, installing a pilot production system the company calls Diamond Forge 1 inside a new clean room and betting that the North Bay suburb can become the anchor of what it's calling “Diamond Valley.” Diamond Quanta Inc. is initially permitted for 10 jobs at the site, with plans to hire highly skilled technical and advanced-manufacturing workers as the operation grows.
Founder Adam Khan said Petaluma offered industrial infrastructure and a skilled labor pool, along with space and room to grow for future needs, according to The Press Democrat. Khan also said the city keeps Diamond Quanta connected to Silicon Valley customers and partners even as Mountain View remains the company's headquarters. The Petaluma site will become Diamond Quanta's primary California operations and process development center, and the company expects its first locally produced parts within months, with plans to showcase the first Petaluma-made parts at CES 2027 in Las Vegas.
What's Actually Inside the Clean Room
The facility includes a 1,000-square-foot ISO Class 5 clean room housing Diamond Forge 1, a pilot manufacturing and process-integration system that covers diamond synthesis, surface preparation and metrology in one line, per the same Press Democrat report. The machine itself is about 25 feet long, requires 480-volt electrical service, and consumes tens of kilowatts while operating. It's designed to manufacture 300-millimeter semiconductor wafers along with multiple smartphone-sized pieces at a time.
Diamond Quanta plans to both license its processes and supply customers with similar equipment for their own production lines, rather than only selling finished parts. The company is targeting durable diamond optical surfaces, diamond-based thermal interfaces for semiconductor systems, and active diamond microelectronics, building on work it showed off commercially at CES 2026, where it debuted its Adamantine Optics™ and Adamantine Thermal™ product lines featuring surface coatings and thermal interface materials engineered with roughly five times the thermal conductivity of copper, according to Diamond Quanta's own announcements.
That performance gap matters because synthetic diamond exhibits a room-temperature thermal conductivity exceeding 2,000 W/(m·K), potentially letting high-power GPUs sustain 10% to 15% higher computational throughput without overheating, as discussed in a Diamond Semiconductor blog. Conventional silicon components, by contrast, face thermal-management challenges, which is why diamond heat spreaders are drawing interest for AI data centers.
State Backing and Power-Cost Relief
California's Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development weighed in on the expansion directly. Chief Deputy Director Emily Desai said in an official statement issued Wednesday that Diamond Quanta's Petaluma move reflects the growing strength of California's semiconductor and advanced manufacturing ecosystem, according to a release carried by Business Wire.
Diamond Quanta expects to tap PG&E's economic-development rate-matching program to reduce its electricity costs, a tool that can be substantial for energy-hungry clean-room operations. Under PG&E's Economic Development Rate tariff, eligible industrial and manufacturing operations can receive electric rate discounts of 12%, 18% or 20% over a five-year period if they commit to creating or retaining jobs in California, according to PG&E.
A Region Hungry for Factory Space
Diamond Quanta's arrival lands amid a broader surge in demand for advanced-manufacturing space across the East Bay, Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Peninsula, which has reached a record level, the Press Democrat reported. Leased advanced-manufacturing space has already surpassed the total leased in all of 2025, with companies like Super Micro, Archer Aviation, Appy and Quanta Computer among those driving activity in the category.
Kristin Hagedorn said advanced manufacturing has overtaken warehouse and distribution uses in regional leasing activity and expects demand to remain strong through the rest of 2026 and into 2027, per the same account. Companies are currently seeking nearly 10 million square feet of space and tend to prefer buildings with about 4,000 amps of electrical capacity.
Echoes of the Old Telecom Valley
Diamond Quanta is explicitly invoking the region's history by calling its operation “Diamond Valley,” a nod to the North Bay's former “Telecom Valley.” The moniker described the Highway 101 corridor between Petaluma and Santa Rosa, where telecommunications equipment startups multiplied following earlier regional innovations led by Digital Telephone Systems founder Don Green, who founded the company in 1969 and Optilink in 1987, according to Wikipedia.
Diamond Quanta plans to expand hiring as code-related improvements accommodate more employees and its customer qualification programs mature into production business, per the Press Democrat.
The Technology's Deeper Roots
Diamond Quanta's science didn't emerge from nowhere. The company has research ties with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which reported in December 2025 on a joint initiative that used pulsed laser annealing to reduce dislocation defects in synthetic diamond for high-power electronics and photonics, according to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Khan has worked in lab-grown diamond technology for more than 15 years and has authored more than 38 diamond-technology patents, per the Press Democrat's reporting. He founded Diamond Quanta in January 2024 after his earlier venture, AKHAN Semiconductor, which had raised more than $30 million, ceased operations in 2024. Diamond Technologies Inc. acquired AKHAN Semiconductor's patent portfolio, equipment and other assets in mid-2025, according to a release distributed via GlobeNewswire.
Diamond Quanta's leadership team includes Afaq Piracha as chief technology officer and Michael Pierantozzi as chief operating officer, the Press Democrat reported. Equipment partners include Extend, which provides diamond-deposition technology, and Heller Industries, which serves as both an investor and system integrator for production equipment.
Funding and What Comes Next
Diamond Quanta was selected by hard-tech venture program HAX in July 2026, joining its program and establishing a relationship involving HAX's Newark facility. HAX provides engineering, manufacturing and commercialization resources to hardware startups, while SOSV's investment of more than $1 million in Diamond Quanta closed the company's pre-seed financing.
The company was also admitted into the NVIDIA Inception program in November 2024, a startup-support program. Diamond Quanta plans to open its next seed funding round in the first quarter of 2027, with the Petaluma facility positioned as the first node around which suppliers and related businesses could develop, the Press Democrat reported.
Whether Petaluma can convert that growth into the kind of durable industrial cluster the old Telecom Valley once was remains an open question the city, the company and its backers will be working through over the next year.
