The hyperscalers building the infrastructure of the AI economy have a $650 billion problem hiding in plain sight—and it doesn’t involve tariffs, talent, or chip export bans. It involves helium.
A new report from Moody’s Ratings warns that helium supply disruptions stemming from the Middle East conflict are now threatening the semiconductor supply chains that underpin artificial intelligence and data center build-out. The colorless, odorless gas is used in multiple critical stages of chip manufacturing—including wafer cooling during etching, as a carrier gas, and for leak detection—and no effective substitutes exist at an industrial scale.
