Qatar supplies a third of the world’s helium, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, but the nation had to halt production shortly after the war erupted three weeks ago.
Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://fortune.com/2026/03/21/iran-war-helium-shortage-qatar-chip-supply-chains-ai-boom/
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When these AI companies eat shit, we can buy their stuff cheap. But maybe they’ll still be valuable with the shortage. Sigh.
No way. Nvidia will buy them back and throw them away so they don’t flood their market, like they did for crypto booms.
AMD, too.
Or they get destroyed for tax purposes. So much waste.
Dumpster diving anyone? We should go work at one when they go under and go by our cars on way to dumpster.
Let’s say we get access to those. What can a regular person do with them? Can we use it as a daily driver computer? Or are we talking about GPUs on the cheap?
And hard drives! They might be SAS or some stuff though, cards are a bit expensive for SAS drives, ask le and my cheap 3TB drive how we know…
For the H100 and up? They’re headless, basically compute only, as they don’t have enough ROPs to game.
I think the A100 technically can game, in the same way you’d use a laptop GPU not hooked up to the display. They’re kinda like giant RTX 3090/ though, so YMMV.
They’re great at GPU compute apps though, same as any regular Nvidia card would be.
Im told some of the ram is salvageable.
As i understand, its not the same ram we christians use
I thought some of it was like laptop ram. Damn.
I’ve read that ai chips can’t be used for anything but ai, but maybe that ram will hit the market and be useful for something.
There will be a need for mass desoldering shops to transfer the ram ICs off of the datacenter boards and onto consumer ram wafers
They literally have boards with soldered RAM? Onto consumer RAM wafers? You mean like gold bonding or something? Like the whole wafer is used or are the RAM ICs tiny? I guess I never thought about it.
Optimal ram speed is obtained by having the ram ICs soldered directly on the mainboard, as close to the (also soldered) cpu as possible, at the cost of easy upgradability - an easy choice for those who only think of the next quarter.
So, I mean the ram ICs can have the solder joints attaching them to datacenter boards melted, and the ICs can be resoldered to the standard ram sticks consumers use in their PCs and laptops. This can be done with home equipment, but not efficiently.