The United States and Iran may no longer be in an ongoing conflict, after establishing and extending a ceasefire in their week-long war, but the list of economic problems and industrial shortages continues to grow—fat, natural gas, jet fuel, tungsten, sulfur, fertilizer.
Adding to that list is an often overlooked, but no less important, industrial input: helium.
The United States and Iran may no longer be in an ongoing conflict, after establishing and extending a ceasefire in their week-long war, but the list of economic problems and industrial shortages continues to grow—fat, natural gas, jet fuel, tungsten, sulfur, fertilizer.
Adding to that list is an often overlooked, but no less important, industrial input: helium.
You may know helium as the gas that keeps party balloons afloat and pushes sound to new heightsbut gas has a greater effect than that. Colorless and lighter than air, helium is also a key ingredient in many of the world’s most powerful technologies, semiconductors, medical devices and more.
If you “think about semiconductors, fiber optics, or anything that uses conducting magnets, the consequences of not having helium are huge in an economic sense,” Nicholas Snyder, CEO of North American Helium, said. is currently producing more than 7 percent of the helium supply in North America. “If you think about medical applications like MRI, there (are) big implications there as well.”
Weeks of war in the Middle East and attacks on energy infrastructure have dealt a bitter blow to the global helium trade, which is primarily produced as a result of natural gas production. Like the world second largest producer of liquefied natural gas (LNG), Qatar in particular is a major helium hub, accounting for approx one third of the world’s helium supply before the war broke out.
That changed after Iran attacked Qatar’s Ras Laffan base a large LNG plant in the world—causing state-owned QatarEnergy to halt production, it announced force majeureand reduce its annual sales of helium by 14 percent.
Exports also have problems leaving the region: Qatar’s huge helium exports normal transport The Strait of Hormuz, an important maritime corridor that has been strangled by war.
The turmoil has already increased the price of heliumwith prices reportedly doubling last month. But since the product is sold mostly through long term contracts-and international travel of helium vessels involves a long delay—more pain may be on the horizon.
This is a “late wakeup call in the helium world,” Snyder said, especially for places like South Korea and Taiwan, he said, which were getting most of their helium from a single source in the Middle East.
For very important products For important technologies, helium has a unique physical property that can do it challenging for the government to save or save for a long time. It can only be shipped internationally as a liquid at 4 degrees Kelvin, said Snyder, who described the gas as a “perishable” product. “There is no reserve in the world that can easily fix this problem,” he said.
The United States is a helium superpower. In fact, it is the world’s largest producer of helium, accounting for 43 percent of global production in 2025, according to data from the US Geological Survey.
The US government recognized the importance of helium for industrial and defense applications as early as 1925, when it adopted Law of Helium to control gas production and establish a strategic helium reserve near Amarillo, Texas. That was then extended during the Cold War in 1960, due to the use of helium in missiles and rockets. But that posture changed in 1996, when the government ordered the privatization of the strategic reserve.
Congress’ argument at the time was that having a large government-owned helium reserve in the US was expensive and kept gas prices “abnormally low,” according to Patrick Wilson, founding principal of the Semiconductor & Innovation Group, a consulting firm in Washington. Wilson previously served as a Commerce Department official during the first Trump administration and earlier as an executive at the Semiconductor Industry Association, where he worked in 2013. Heli’s Guardianship Law that it reduced personalization of helium reserves amid fears of supply shortages. The law’s 2021 deadline for selling shares was extended further during the COVID-19 pandemic before it was announced. it is finished in 2024.
“All these tanks are very expensive to maintain … so it was a big storm for the government to get out of the business,” Wilson said. “Now, the government basically has no strategic reserve anymore.”
Today, with the threat of a supply crisis that the former strategic reserve was designed to prevent, some want the reserve back. “What remains is a private system serving commercial needs, not a public body designed to insure against major national or international disruptions,” said Robert Z. Lawrence of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. he wrote this week. Helium “is not just another commodity,” he added. “The social costs of failing to keep adequate accounts are greater than the personal costs.”
Similar demands are also being made on the other side of the world, by the Taiwan Semiconductor Industry Association call to Taiwan’s government this month to “increase strategic reserves of helium and natural gas.”
Semiconductor chips have become the backbone of the world economy over the past decade, enabling many technologies that are fundamental to our daily lives as well as advanced applications including missiles, artificial intelligence structures, data centers, and quantum computing.
And none of them work without helium. A gas is a important material in many stages of chip manufacturing processfrom cooling the magnets used to keep the silicon wafers stable so that the electronic systems that make them tick can be used to repel potential contaminants from the chipmaking environment. Chipmakers “not only need a lot of them, they need them all the time,” Wilson said.
Those demands are only set to increase as semiconductors become more advanced and more demanding. A 2024 report and market research firm IDTechEx predicted that global industry demand for helium will increase by more than five times over the next decade. It also has significant implications for AI data center growth that Gulf countries such as Qatar have spent billions of dollars on.
“The AI economy is based on tokens, tokens that run on GPUs, and GPUs rely on Qatari helium, Israeli bromine, and LNG ships with a single 21-mile trip from the Persian Gulf,” David Pan, AI industry leader at financial services firm Moody’s, wrote in a press release.
And despite the ceasefire that has largely been in place so far — halting Iranian attacks on Qatar and other Gulf states — the Strait of Hormuz remains closed due to overlapping US-Iranian blockades. “If the ceasefire holds and if this leads to a more isolated Iran-but-not-the-neighbors-involved conflict, I would imagine that (helium) production could resume quickly — but if they can’t get it out of the region, it doesn’t matter,” said Bettina Weiss, chief of staff and corporate strategy at 3mico and Semi00 global supply chain. “Even if the water channel opens today, it will take an average of four to six months to restore the supply,” he added. “So this is not something where we said, ‘Okay, the conflict is over, Qatar is back, we’re going to leave.’ It takes a long time for these things to adjust.”
Meanwhile, Weiss and Wilson said that costs for the chip industry will continue to rise—not only for helium but also for other inputs, fueled by shipping delays—likely to create a snowball effect on the global economy.
“This is a good example of how the small electronics industry is at risk of driving up the cost of everything else,” Wilson added.
