The Surat Diamond Bourse, Opened on 17 December 2023 With 4,700 Offices and 7.1 Million Square Feet of Floor Space, Is the Guinness Record Holder for Largest Office Building

The Surat Diamond Bourse in Gujarat holds the Guinness World Records title for the largest office building, with 659,611 square metres (7.1 million square feet) of floor space. Guinness dates the record to 8 August 2023, and the Prime Minister inaugurated the complex on 17 December 2023. It stands in the city that a Guinness article credits with polishing and cutting around 90 per cent of the world’s diamond supply.

What opened on 17 December 2023

The Prime Minister’s Office release of 17 December 2023 describes the bourse as meant to be the world’s largest and most modern centre for the international diamond and jewellery trade, for both rough and polished stones. The release lists a customs clearance house for imports and exports, a jewellery mall for retail trade, and international banking with safe vaults. The Prime Minister said the bourse would lead to 1.5 lakh (150,000) new jobs.

The bourse is run as a not-for-profit company registered under section 8 of the Companies Act, 2013, according to its website. The release names Vallabhbhai Lakhani as chairman of the Surat Diamond Bourse at the time and Laljibhai Patel of Dharmanandan Diamond Ltd as present at the event. The same morning the Prime Minister opened the new terminal at Surat Airport, which the release says gave the airport international status, and mentioned a Surat to Dubai flight that had begun and a Hong Kong flight due to start soon.

In the same address he said India’s share of global gems and jewellery exports was 3.5 per cent and that “If Surat decides, then our share in gems-jewelry export can touch double-digit.”

Nine towers around a central spine

Guinness describes the complex as nine rectangular structures joined by a central spine, on more than 35 acres, rising 15 storeys. Its record page says construction concluded on 1 August 2023. A Guinness article of 22 August 2023 says the project started in 2015.

The architects were the Indian firm Morphogenesis. Dezeen reported on 26 July 2023 that the building has 4,717 offices for 67,000 diamond professionals, with offices ranging from 28 square metres to more than 10,500 square metres, most of them small. Every office can be reached from any entrance within seven minutes. The wings face north and south to cut exposure to the western sun, and courtyards between them let daylight into every office. The facades are glazed, with Gwalior white sandstone, and the central spine uses red granite from within 300 kilometres.

Guinness’s article gives the cost as 32 billion rupees (₹3,200 crore). Figures for size and offices differ by source:

• Floor area: Guinness gives 659,611 square metres (7.1 million square feet). The bourse’s own website gives 6.7 million square feet of built-up area. Dezeen rounds to 660,000 square metres and puts the Pentagon, the previous holder, at 620,000.
• Offices: the bourse website says 4,700 or more. Dezeen counts 4,717. Guinness says 4,700 office spaces and room for more than 65,000 professionals.

Where the diamond trade of Surat began

The Kimberley Process, the certification scheme for rough diamonds, lists no rough production for India in any year from 2021 to 2025. The country’s diamond trade is the cutting and polishing of stones mined elsewhere.

De Beers, in a history on its Indian website, traces the modern industry’s organisation to 1909, when trading families from Palanpur, about 400 kilometres from Surat, entered the business. By the Second World War some had buying offices in Antwerp. After independence in 1947, foreign exchange controls made imports of polished stones difficult, and entrepreneurs turned to making them. The article says Surat became an early centre partly because it is close to Bombay, and that early Indian work focused on stones below half a carat. Diamond World, a trade magazine, adds that Jain elders met in Palanpur in 1909 and encouraged young men to enter the trade, and that the GJEPC was formed in 1966.

How much of the world’s diamonds Surat cuts

Three claims circulate, and they measure different things. The GJEPC homepage carries a banner asking how India delivers 90 per cent of the world’s cut and polished diamonds. A Guinness article puts the figure at around 90 per cent for Surat itself. A Diamond World history of January 2014 says India processed about 11 of every 12 of the world’s diamonds. None of these gives a year or a method, and no figure from the Kimberley Process or GJEPC settles the share.

The Kimberley Process does record how much rough enters. India’s page lists rough imports of 106.10 million carats worth US$11,074.1 million in 2025, and exports of rough of 15.01 million carats worth US$585.1 million. The 2021 imports were 172.73 million carats worth US$17,863.7 million. The page does not say how much of the rough reaches Surat, so these are national figures.

The customs house inside the bourse

The customs house in the basement of the bourse’s Diamond Club began operations on 8 August 2024 with a trial run and its first shipping bill, Indian Jeweller reported that day. Until then, the report says, fewer than 10 per cent of diamonds exported from Surat cleared through the city’s customs office. The rest went through Mumbai, which added a day and extra cost.

DeshGujarat reported on 1 April 2026 the 2025-26 figures of the customs office at the bourse. It handled 5,088 parcels with a transaction value of about ₹42,636 crore. Imports were 4,160 parcels holding 512.75 lakh carats of rough diamonds and lab-grown seeds, worth ₹41,515 crore. Exports were 928 parcels worth ₹1,121 crore. December 2025 was the busiest month, with 350 parcels of natural rough diamonds, 28.43 lakh carats and about ₹4,505 crore. The report credits steps such as simpler know-your-customer checks, a shorter bond validity of 5 days instead of 10, and the transfer of transshipment permit generation to the bourse.

What India exported in 2025-26 and 2026

GJEPC said on 15 April 2026 that gem and jewellery exports for 2025-26 were US$27.72 billion (₹2,44,827.26 crore), down 3.32 per cent in dollars and up 0.93 per cent in rupees. Cut and polished diamonds were 43.9 per cent of that, about US$12.2 billion, which is 8.5 per cent lower than a year before. Polished lab-grown diamonds were about US$1.1 billion, and studded jewellery set with lab-grown stones rose 31.3 per cent. The GJEPC chairman described the year as a “structural reset for the Indian gem and jewellery industry.”

For the six months from April to September 2026, GJEPC data reported on 15 October 2026 show cut and polished diamond exports of 8.4 million carats, up 4.6 per cent from 8.03 million carats a year earlier. Their value in dollars was down 7 per cent to US$5.8 billion, and up 2.3 per cent in rupees to ₹55,336 crore. Polished lab-grown exports for the six months rose 17.1 per cent to US$685.1 million. For India’s wider export record, see India’s record US$863 billion of exports in 2025-26.

The workforce and the offices still filling

The Week reported on 17 August 2025 that the vice-president of the Surat Diamond Workers Union, Bhavesh Tank, estimated the industry employed 7.5 to 10 lakh people before the downturn, and that 3.5 to 4 lakh had been affected. A former secretary of the Surat Diamond Association, Damji Mavani, said employment had fallen from around 15 lakh to about 7 lakh since 2008, and attributed part of the fall to technology needing fewer workers. The Gujarat government’s relief measures, as the magazine lists them, include school fee support of up to ₹13,500 per child for unemployed artisans, interest subsidies on loans up to ₹5 lakh and a year’s exemption from electricity duty from July 2025. For the state around the city, see Gujarat at a glance.

Offices have filled more slowly than the building. ThePrint reported in July 2024 that bourse officials counted about 250 offices operating, while people familiar with the project put the number nearer 10. IDEX Online reported on 7 April 2026 that fewer than 250 of the 4,700 offices were operational. At a traders’ felicitation event reported by DeshGujarat on 5 April 2026, Gujarat’s Deputy Chief Minister, Harsh Sanghavi, spoke of reaching 1,000 offices within a year; IDEX gave his figure as 1,500. At the 5 April 2026 event the bourse’s vice-president, Laljibhai Patel, said nearly 80 per cent of business operations had begun, and Mukesh Patel of Green Lab Diamond said lab-grown diamond offices would open in the bourse. Three tenders had been held at the bourse in the previous 15 days, one of them by an Israeli company, DeshGujarat reported.