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Isn't the power consumption needed to create pure/no-blemish lab diamonds so great, that this wouldn't be feasible to scale.

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Lab diamonds are used in huge quantities (ie. By the bucketful ) for making cutting tools like saws and drill bits.

I believe the main difficulty is making large and pure diamonds. Making small low purity diamonds is cheap and easy to scale.

That was ten years ago. Today, lab grown diamonds are cheaper than natural at any size or quality, which is why the diamond cartels are sh*tting little bricks that are almost as hard.

Sure, but big ones still are expensive compared to say sand or other hard materials.

This is not my field, but I'm...socialy adjacent? and my understanding is that we grow big crystals of silicon because that's the mature technology, but then there are multiple cutting & polishing steps that add to the cost.

We want small pieces of thin wafers, but we grow huge crystals and then slice them into wafers that we then have to cut up. With vapor deposition diamond you can remove a lot of those steps by growing what you need, say a grid of chips of the desired dimensions directly on a carrier substrate.

As I understand it.

massive crushing pressure is not the only way to create diamond particles.

do you mind explaining more

Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD)

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