DST

Trade 2 min read

DMCC splits lab-grown diamonds off into a trading desk of their own

Two cut-paper gem shapes side by side on a slate ground, one pale grey-blue and one cream, a thin brass line between them

A market gets its own desk when the old desk stops describing it. On 30 August the DMCC gave lab-grown diamonds one.

What changed

DMCC has established a Lab-Grown Diamond Vertical as a standalone platform, separate from the natural diamond and coloured stone activities it had been filed under. The stated reason is that the two have different economics: one is mined, and one is manufactured and therefore scalable.

The numbers behind it

UAE lab-grown diamond trade reached 76.9 million carats in 2025, a 91.5% increase year on year. Volumes have risen 109% since 2022, when they stood at 36.8 million carats.

Value moved differently. The trade was worth $1.3 billion, up 7.5% — volume nearly doubling while value rose by single digits is the price curve doing what a manufactured good's price curve does.

For scale, the UAE's total diamond trade was $41.7 billion in 2025. Lab-grown is about three per cent of that by value and a great deal more than that by carat.

Why a vertical rather than a category

Ahmed Bin Sulayem, DMCC's Executive Chairman and CEO, put it as a question of infrastructure rather than of taste: lab-grown diamonds, he said, have reached the point where they need dedicated market infrastructure and a distinct economic case of their own.

The practical content of that is grading, certification, storage and dispute rules written for a product whose supply is a function of factory capacity rather than of geology.

The divergence between the two figures is the whole story and it is easy to misread. A 91.5% rise in carats against a 7.5% rise in value means the average price per carat fell sharply over the year — which is what happens to any manufactured good as production capacity catches up with demand, and is not by itself a sign of weak demand. The reason a separate vertical matters commercially is that a falling unit price is intolerable inside a category whose valuation conventions were written for a scarce good: the same warehouse and financing terms cannot serve both. For anyone setting up a stones business in a DMCC free zone, the change to watch for is whether the licence activity list splits in the same way the vertical has.

Source: Dubai Government Media Office checked against the source

More Dubai news

A dense crowd of small upright cream paper figures in the lower left, thinning to single figures, with the rest of the slate-blue ground left empty behind a torn paper edge

Market

2,100 jobs, and no denominator

The Real Estate Empowerment Programme created more than 2,100 jobs for Emiratis in Dubai property between 2023 and 2026 — about fifty a month. The release gives no baseline to measure them against.

Five pale paper discs on a deep slate ground, three of them crossed by a cream paper strip and two left bare

AI

Six clocks, one AI-designed drug

Six proteomic aging clocks read a lower biological age in patients given rentosertib, an AI-designed drug. The authors say the reading is not yet clean.

A sealed paper envelope beside an open one of the same size, its flap folded back

AI

Marked text, private detector

Anthropic began watermarking Claude's output on 2 August. The mark is in the model's word choices, and the tool that reads it is in private preview.