Ahmed Bin Sulayem had a specific problem to solve. Lab-grown diamonds had outgrown the infrastructure built to manage them, and the numbers made the case plainly: the UAE traded 76.9 million carats of the material in 2025, nearly double the 36.8 million carats that moved through the market in 2022.
Dubai’s commodities authority responded by creating a dedicated home for the sector. The Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC) established the Lab-Grown Diamond Vertical, a standalone division that separates lab-grown diamonds from DMCC’s existing natural diamond and coloured stone operations. The move acknowledges that the sector now operates under distinct economic principles and serves purposes well beyond jewellery.
The 2025 trade figures tell the story of that shift. The UAE’s lab-grown diamond trade rose 91.5 per cent in volume from the previous year, while value climbed 7.5 per cent to $1.3 billion. Both imports and re-exports expanded at comparable rates, pointing to broad-based growth rather than a spike in any single segment.
Bin Sulayem, executive chairman and CEO of DMCC, framed the vertical as a response to the material’s expanding role in industries far removed from adornment. “Lab-grown diamonds have reached the point where they need dedicated market infrastructure and a distinct economic case of their own, developed alongside the natural diamond trade rather than in place of it,” he said. The global sector, which he estimated at close to $30 billion, has been shaped over decades by scientific and technological advances concentrated in China, India and the United States.
That concentration matters. China has emerged as the dominant centre for industrial-scale production and research and development. India functions as a powerhouse for CVD growth, manufacturing and processing. The United States pioneered diamond-growth technology and remains the industry’s largest consumer market. Japan, Israel and the United Kingdom have also established themselves as hubs for research, industrial applications and trade.
Meanwhile, the most consequential opportunities may lie not in rings or pendants but in applications where the material’s thermal, optical and mechanical properties become commercially valuable. Semiconductors, diamond wafers, quantum technologies, medical devices and aerospace systems represent the frontiers where lab-grown diamonds could play a critical role. With 76.9 million carats traded through the UAE in a single year, Bin Sulayem argued that Dubai already possesses the scale to shape what comes next.
The Lab-Grown Diamond Vertical will function as a global platform bringing together producers, manufacturers, traders, investors, finance providers, technology companies and industrial users. The aim is to strengthen Dubai’s connections with the industry’s main global markets while building the transparent market mechanisms the sector needs to keep expanding.
The broader diamond trade in the UAE reached $41.7 billion in 2025, with synthetic and industrial diamond volumes also recording sharp growth. Whether the new vertical can attract the technology companies and industrial users that would make Dubai a genuine centre for the sector’s next phase, rather than simply a trading corridor, remains the open question the DMCC’s new structure is designed to answer.