Helium: The Invisible Chokepoint Behind AI

How I got here

I was prepping for DC Decoded a series on data centers, power infrastructure, and the supply chains behind the AI boom.

This week I was listening to a podcast featuring Eddie Fishman, former State Department sanctions official and author of Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare. His thinking on how the world’s invisible dependencies shape geopolitical outcomes made me pull on one thread I did not expect to follow.

Helium.

It started with a closed strait

The Strait of Hormuz closed and the world tracked oil prices.

Nobody tracked the helium.

Most people know helium as the gas that makes balloons float. Here is what most people do not know helium is critical to semiconductor manufacturing. It is injected between silicon wafers and their carriers during the etching process to dissipate heat instantly. Without it the wafer warps and becomes useless. There is no substitute. The process either has helium or it stops.

One of the world’s largest helium producers sits on the world’s biggest natural gas field. Helium is extracted as a byproduct of gas processing. On March 2 drones struck its main facility the largest LNG complex on the planet. Production halted. Force majeure was declared. A third of global helium supply went offline in days.

The container problem

Helium cannot be stored like oil. It must be chilled into liquid form and kept in specialized insulated containers that can only hold it for 35 to 48 days. After that it warms, turns back to gas, and vents out. It is gone.

There are approximately 200 of these containers in the world. Each costs around a million dollars. Most of them are sitting idle right now stuck on the wrong side of a closed strait.

Even if production resumes quickly the logistics disruption alone could stretch over months. The supply chain was built around one place working. Unwinding that takes time the industry does not have.

Who is exposed

The chip fabs that manufacture the memory and logic chips inside every AI server, every data center, every device get the majority of their helium from that same region. They are now running on inventory buffers measured in weeks. Spot prices jumped between 40 and 100% in a single week.

Before March 2 the semiconductor industry was already running at its limits. The world’s largest memory chip maker had sold out its entire 2026 supply. The world’s largest logic chip foundry was running three times short of demand. The AI boom had already consumed every buffer in the system.

Helium landed on an industry with no slack left.

Six to twelve weeks of semiconductor grade helium inventory remains. After that fabs start rationing. Fewer wafers started means fewer chips shipped means longer lead times for the data centers and AI infrastructure the market had decided were untouchable.

They are not untouchable. They never were.

Where the ripple actually reaches

This is the part most people miss.

A state in Australia made all trains, trams and buses free throughout April because petrol prices got too high. Families in Melbourne are riding free because of what happened at a gas facility thousands of miles away.

A ceramic tile factory in India suspended production for three weeks. Not because of anything to do with tiles. Because the kilns run on gas and the gas stopped coming.

Restaurants and hotels across India shifted to cooking on firewood and coal because cooking gas ran out. On Amazon, sales of induction stoves rose more than thirtyfold in days as families scrambled to find another way to cook.

Egypt told shops and restaurants to close early and asked non-essential workers to stay home. The Philippines declared a national emergency and introduced a four day work week for civil servants. Ethiopia told government staff not to come in to reduce fuel consumption.

In the UK inflation is expected to breach 5%. Chemical and steel manufacturers added surcharges of up to 30% overnight.

Transcontinental flight fares more than doubled in the first week. Fares to the Caribbean rose 58%. Fares to Florida jumped 43%.

None of the people affected by any of this had any part in what happened at the Strait. All of them are paying for it through their commute, their gas bill, their flight booking, their dinner.

Where my thinking went first

When I had all of this in front of me I remembered MLK.

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

It felt obvious. The data proved it. Helium from one corner of the world reaching chip fabs across the globe reaching AI servers reaching all of us. We are connected whether we choose to be or not.

My first instinct was this is the argument for staying connected. Keep channels open. We need each other. The supply chain data makes the case better than any speech could.

Then I stopped.

I realised I was using MLK to make a business case.

And a business case only holds as long as the business does. The day someone finds an alternative helium source, builds a new supply chain, reroutes the corridor that argument weakens. Supply chains get redesigned when the numbers change. Economic connections break when the economics change.

A connection built only on need breaks the moment the need changes.

That is not what he meant. And I had almost missed it entirely.

What he was actually saying

MLK was saying something much simpler than a supply chain argument.

Treat people as people. Not as leverage. Not as transactions. Not as problems to be managed or populations to be pressured.

That idea does not expire when someone builds a new refinery. It does not weaken when a trade route gets redesigned. It is not dependent on helium prices or chip inventories or flight surcharges.

It is just see the person in front of you as a person. Give them the dignity you want for yourself.

That is it. That is the whole thing.

The thought I could not shake

If that view had genuinely guided decisions not as a slogan but as a real way of seeing people the conditions that create conflicts like this would be less likely to exist.

Not managed better after the fact. Not recovered from more efficiently. Less likely to begin.

The closed strait, the chip fabs watching their clocks, the restaurant owner in Mumbai burning firewood, the family in Melbourne riding free trams these did not come from nowhere. They are the cost of decisions made long before the first missile flew. Decisions about how the other side was seen. Whether they were treated as people to be understood or problems to be contained.

The helium shortage did not cause this.

It is what happens when people stop being seen as people.

MLK saw it clearly in 1963. The supply chains in 2026 are just showing us what it costs when we ignore it.

The garment he described, we have been weaving it tighter every year.

We just keep forgetting it is the same one.

Sources: USGS, Fitch Ratings, Barclays, Kornbluth Helium Consulting, CNBC, Fortune, Bank of America, S&P Global, Al Jazeera, NPR, BBC, TrendForce, Tom’s Hardware, Wikipedia Economic Impact of the 2026 Iran War - March 2026.

Eddie Fishman - Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare. Heard on podcast, March 2026.

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