Story off. Numbers on.

Global helium production in 2025: approximately 190 million cubic meters, or about 6.7 billion cubic feet. That output was distributed across a handful of sources, and the concentration is staggering.

Qatar's Ras Laffan Industrial City produced roughly 63 million cubic meters of helium in 2025 — all of it as a byproduct of LNG processing. Iranian missiles struck the complex on March 18 and 19, 2026, damaging two LNG trains and the gas-to-liquids facility, knocking an estimated 310 million cubic feet of annual capacity offline. The Strait of Hormuz, the only sea route out for that helium, had already been effectively closed since February. Four vessels transited on August 23, against a normal rate of 85 per day.

Then the dominos. Russia's government imposed temporary helium export controls on April 14, routing Gazprom's Amur Gas Processing Plant output — the country's largest — to domestic consumption through end of 2027. China, which imports more than 85% of its helium and sourced over half from Qatar, banned all helium exports on July 10. No end date published. Three supply valves closed in five months.

Spot helium prices have breached $1,000 to $1,200 per thousand cubic feet in shortage-hit regions. Long-term contracts sit at $500 to $600. That's a 2x gap between paper commitments and physical reality. If you've been reading this letter for a while, you know what that gap means.

With Hormuz closed, effective global supply has dropped to roughly 5.3 billion cubic feet against demand of 6 billion — a 10% to 12% structural deficit right now. But that number assumes cavern storage holds. Garrison Ventures estimates the deficit widens to 20% once underground storage sites are depleted. There is no strategic reserve to draw from. The US sold its last one.

US production — overwhelmingly concentrated at ExxonMobil's Shute Creek facility in Wyoming, which alone accounts for roughly 20% of global output — is now the single most important stabilizer of helium supply on Earth. One plant. One company. One county in southwestern Wyoming. That's the diagram.

South Korea.

In 2025, South Korea imported 64.7% of its helium from Qatar. The share was even higher for ultra-pure 6N grade — the stuff leading-edge fabs require for EUV lithography cooling and wafer processing. That supply is now gone. Not reduced. Not rerouted. Gone, behind a closed strait and a bombed-out facility with a three-to-five-year repair timeline.

Samsung and SK Hynix sit inside this kill zone. SK Hynix produces roughly 50% of global High Bandwidth Memory — the chips strapped to every Nvidia GPU powering every AI data center that every earnings call in America is currently bragging about. If SK Hynix rations helium, HBM supply tightens. If HBM supply tightens, Nvidia's revenue guidance has a problem. Nobody on the sell side has modeled helium as a variable in AI capex forecasts. I've checked.

Taiwan's exposure is just as severe — roughly 86% from Qatar, under 5% from the US. Neither country maintains a strategic helium reserve. Neither does Japan. I've seen commodity supply chains snap before over materials far less critical than this, and the pattern is always the same: everyone assumes someone else is holding inventory, and then one morning nobody is.

The recycling story is real but overstated. Over 70% of fabs in Japan and Taiwan already run closed-loop helium recovery capturing 90–95% of process helium. That's impressive engineering. It also means the easy efficiency gains are already captured. You can't recycle your way out of a 20% supply deficit when you're already recovering 90% of what you use. The remaining losses are thermodynamic — they leak. Helium is the smallest noble gas molecule in existence. It finds every gap.

And here's the detail that would be funny if the stakes were lower: while fabs are fighting for allocation and hospitals are rationing MRI scans in developing countries because the superconducting magnets can't run without liquid helium cooling — the party balloon industry is still consuming helium. There is no global allocation priority system. A children's birthday party in suburban Dallas is competing for the same molecule that SK Hynix needs to cool an EUV tool printing 2-nanometer transistors for the US Department of Defense.

New supply exists on paper. ASP Isotopes announced stable liquid helium production at Renergen's Virginia Gas Project in South Africa four days ago. Phase 1 produces roughly 70 Mcf per day. That's encouraging. It's also roughly 1.1% of what Qatar produced. Phase 2 is 13 times larger and has a $750 million financing package, but the timeline stretches well into the back half of this decade. The rescue crew is real. It's just several years from the building that's currently on fire.