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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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.