Nobody is Talking About The Helium Problem

Yes, the Iran war is going to make your tech more expensive, but here's a supply chain that no one's talking about, helium. And no, not the balloon kind, right? The industrial kind that's critical to high-end chip manufacturing.

Its properties as an inert gas, it also conducts heat. It makes it essential to the process. And right now, AI companies and consumers, they are both competing for every single chip that exists. of the world's helium is sitting in Qatar. And so there's two problems. First, helium is a by-product of extracting natural gas and Iranian strikes have been hitting Qatari production facilities.

And second, even if they could produce it, they can't ship it. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Now the one workaround being floated is a pipeline through Saudi Arabia to the Suez Canal, but Iran's allies in Yemen,

they've already signaled that they're willing that route too. And that says, tech prices were already multiple times higher than a year ago before any of this. Chips were already hard to come by. This is the thing that makes that worse. So if you were waiting to buy anything with a chip in it, you were holding off a laptop, a phone, anything with RAM, understand that that window may be closing. So yeah, share to spread the word,

So yeah, share to spread the word, get full updates on my sub stack, links and bio.