Submitted 15 hours ago by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to globalnews@lemmy.zip
https://fortune.com/2026/03/21/iran-war-helium-shortage-qatar-chip-supply-chains-ai-boom/
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: archive.is/…/iran-war-helium-shortage-qatar-chip-…
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Finally… some good news.
lol this shit is getting funnier by the day.
Iran is kicking off the butlerian jihad and I’m supposed to be mad at them?
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.
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?
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
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
altphoto@lemmy.today 3 hours ago
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.
altphoto@lemmy.today 2 hours ago
Helium-icon microscopes, an alternative to scanning electron microscopes.
Leak detection is needed to check Air Conditioners…let that sink in!!!
altphoto@lemmy.today 3 hours ago
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altphoto@lemmy.today 3 hours ago
Party balloons… Some use hydrogen and methane… Right?
altphoto@lemmy.today 2 hours ago
And then we have dumb uses for helium:
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