Abstract High-quality AlN is directly grown on sputtered AlN (Sp-AlN) without pretreatment, using jet stream gas flow metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE). For the 12 nm-thick Sp-AlN sample, a full width at half maximum (FWHM) of 16 arcseconds was observed in the 0002 X-ray diffraction (XRD) ω scan, along with atomic steps with high linearity were observed despite the short AlN growth time of 15 min. Although the FWHMs of MOVPE-AlN 0002 ω scans improved as the thickness of Sp-AlN decreased,