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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Hold on to your phones like they were the very last ones ever made. No helium = no computing at all.
Hard drives use helium. Aluminum/tig and other Welding uses helium, all chip making processes use helium, laser cutters use helium, fusion energy LOL, uses helium like a total bitch. Some chemistry uses helium.
We are soooo fucked.
#Mycabbages!
Helium-icon microscopes, an alternative to scanning electron microscopes.
Leak detection is needed to check Air Conditioners…let that sink in!!!
Party balloons… Some use hydrogen and methane… Right?
And then we have dumb uses for helium:
Finally… some good news.
It’s also needed in medical diagnostics.
Alright, back to bad news.
Nobody in qatar who deserves to live was ever gonna get an mri.
Too bad you cant just bomb AI itself
You literally can. The data centers are fragile as fuck.
Since AI is running the Defense Department, if we tried to bomb AI, wouldn’t it just go, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that”?
lol this shit is getting funnier by the day.
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.
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
Iran is kicking off the butlerian jihad and I’m supposed to be mad at them?
Oh no! Anyway…
Scapegoat located
Honestly didn’t know Qatar was a chip producer. Wack
I don’t think they are, at least not a major one. Helium is important in chip production, Qatar probably captures some from their oil/gas fields and exports it.
Ohhhhh, I didn’t read “supply chains” my fault I am eepy
Go back to fucking sharks.
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