Forget gas prices and fertilizer. One of the biggest casualties of the US war on Iran could be your favorite AI chatbot.
As the hare-brained conflict enters its fifth week, the tech industry is raising alarm about a growing shortage of helium, the odorless gas that makes birthday balloons lighter than air — and which, it turns out, is silently undergirding the AI boom.
Per the Wall Street Journal, when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps effectively shut off travel through the Strait of Hormuz in response to US and Israeli aggression, they also cut off nearly a third of the world’s helium supply.
That’s because Qatar, the gulf state laying claim to the largest natural gas field on the planet, is responsible for 30 to 35 percent of the world’s helium production. Qatar, host of the US’s Al Udeid Air Base, is effectively a belligerent of Iran, meaning that until hostilities cease, that helium isn’t getting through.
That’s bad news for anybody building data centers right now. Per the WSJ, helium is a crucial component for cooling the machines responsible for building AI chips. With a tightening bottleneck on the critical gas, it’s likely that chip manufacturers will have to curb production as they ration their remaining gas. As the helium industry typically operates via long-term contracts, chip producers have scrambled to secure short-term suppliers, exacerbating the effects of the shortage with an all-out-bidding-war.
“The helium shock highlights a deeper vulnerability in the AI build‑out: extreme dependence on a small number of geopolitically exposed nodes,” Ralf Gubler, research director at S&P Global Energy told the WSJ.
Even when the Straight of Hormuz eventually opens, relief will take months, if not years. As Qatar’s mining facilities have taken hits from Iran, state-owned petrochemical giant QatarEnergy estimates its overall helium exports will drop by 17 percent, Al Jazeera reported. Even assuming hostilities cease today, it would still take three to five years to repair this capacity.
“The first victims are party balloons: you can quite easily allocate less there and deal with a few angry parents,” Anish Kapadia, founder of energy consulting firm AKAP Energy told the WSJ. “But clearly when you take a third of global supply off the market overnight, there’s going to be a significant impact across the board.”
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