Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
The world has lost 40 per cent of its helium supply since the start of the Iran war, first from Qatar and then from Russia.
We will find out soon enough whether the global digital economy can shrug off losses on this scale and whether political leaders will allow the AI boom to keep gobbling up an ever greater share of the scarce helium that remains.
Industry cannot make advanced AI chips or semiconductors below 10 nanometres without ultra-high-purity helium to cool the wafers and stabilise the plasma for etching. Even workhorse chips for cars and computers require lower-grade helium at 99.999 per cent purity.
But we also need helium for other high priorities: in nuclear power, advanced weaponry, aerospace, fibre-optic cables, quantum computing, chromatography or to cool superconducting magnets in MRI machines.
“Everybody is scrambling around trying to scoop up whatever they can find in the world,” said Phil Kornbluth, the founder of Kornbluth Helium and former head of gases at BOC.
There are no easy substitutes. Liquid helium is the coldest known substance on Earth, with a boiling point of minus 269 degrees.
It cannot be synthesised artificially – it is created naturally over millions of years through the radioactive decay of thorium and uranium – and is extracted from natural gas deposits using cryogenic distillation.
Helium is hard to store. China has strategic stockpiles of everything but not for this one vital input.
It is a small cost for digital behemoths with the deepest pockets in the world, relying on “fabs” or foundries that cost $US20 billion ($28 billion) a shot. “They are not going to close a wafer fab, so we all know what they’ll do: they’ll just pay more than anybody else,” said Kornbluth.
Another insidious process is at work. The semiconductor industry is in effect hoarding its scarce supply for the most lucrative AI fabs while rationing helium for routine “mature-node” chips that play a far bigger role in the day-to-day economy.
“They triage,” said Piers Nash, the head of AI at Farmers Insurance. They reserve what they have for AI accelerators, high-bandwidth memory and advanced logic chips for data centres. There is less left for chips in cars, laptops and the consumer electronics on which we all rely.
“Everybody is talking about petrol prices but nobody is talking about helium,” said Sepp Müller, a Christian Democratic politician leading a taskforce on the Iran war in the German Bundestag.
The fear is that there could be a repeat of the chip shortage that shut down European car factories during the pandemic. A COVID-19 lockdown at a plant in Malaysia caused crippling losses on the other side of the globe.
“If a semiconductor factory anywhere in the world says that it won’t be able to supply more chips, the car industry is going to have big problems in the third and fourth quarters,” he said.
Qatar normally supplies a third of the world’s helium, a by-product of natural gas production at its giant North Field. Not a single shipment has moved through the Strait of Hormuz since the war began.
Some 200 cryogenic containers are stranded in the Gulf and are slowly heating up, causing gas to leak out through the pressure valves to avert a lethal explosion.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has compounded the shortage by imposing what amounts to a ban on helium exports outside the Eurasian Economic Union, purportedly to secure supply for Russia’s domestic economy and fibre-optic industry.
This endangers another 9 per cent until the end of 2027.
For once, it is China that is taking the immediate brunt of the supply chain shock. It produces barely 15 per cent of its own helium needs. All the rest comes from Qatar and Russia.
“Mainland Chinese fabs (foundries) could run out in a matter of weeks,” said the research group Trivium China. Air Liquide has already declared “force majeure” on its sales to China.
America is sitting pretty in one sense. It is the world’s biggest helium producer with two-fifths of the market.
But that does not shield the American people from the larger supply-chain consequences any more than US oil supremacy spares them from rising crude prices or mounting shortages of jet fuel and diesel.
The US subcontracts most of its chip production to Asia. Its share of global semiconductor output has collapsed to 10 per cent from 37 per cent in the 1990s. It will be years before the US chips act and manufacturing rearmament turn this around.
‘Everybody is talking about petrol prices but nobody is talking about helium.’
Sepp Müller, a Christian Democratic politician leading a taskforce on the Iran war in the German Bundestag
Over 75 per cent of the world’s semiconductors are made in Asia. Nvidia either makes or finishes all of its most advanced Blackwell chips at TSMC plants in Taiwan, while Samsung makes high-bandwidth AI chips for Google in South Korea. Both countries normally rely on Qatar for two-thirds of their helium.
Large volumes of workhorse chips for just about everything else are made in Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand, often as arm’s-length operations for China.
Kornbluth says the world had plenty of helium before the war broke out and can probably cover half the loss from Qatar at a pinch. The industry has an informal system for allocating scarce supply to the most critical needs.
“The top of the food chain are MRI machines, chip manufacturing, aerospace and nuclear power. At the bottom end are things like welding. Some people are going to get hurt badly,” he said.
One thing we should have learned from the pandemic is that once the world’s just-in-time supply chain goes into convulsions, with ships scattered to the four winds and stuck in the wrong place, the effects can be drastic, long-lasting and out of all proportion to the nominal value of the goods themselves.
If the war drags on for a few more weeks – as it may well do since both Donald Trump and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards think they are winning – there are only two solutions.
Either the market destroys demand in its own ruthless way or governments step in with emergency measures and make hard choices, something that Sir Keir Starmer’s government in the UK seems incapable of ever doing.
For jet fuel, diesel or naphtha, it may mean a taste of wartime rationing. For helium, it may soon be a question of whether liberal democracies allow billionaire tech brothers to outbid everybody and hoard scarce gas for unpopular AI expansion.
Do politicians finally face down the hyperscalers and redirect helium supplies to the urgent priorities of military and energy rearmament, as well as to sustain routine sectors of the economy that employ infinitely more people?
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio more or less admitted on Monday that Iran’s regime now had enormous power to do harm and that Washington had no coherent plan to restore the status quo ante, let alone to reach a better outcome that vindicated the war.
“The Strait of Hormuz is basically an economic nuclear weapon that they’re trying to use against the world,” he said.
Indeed, sir, and what are you going to do about it?
Telegraph, London
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