French industrial gas supplier Air Liquide opened a new factory near the port of Taichung, Taiwan, on Wednesday, as the semiconductor industry faces a worsening helium shortage triggered by the ongoing U.S.-Iran conflict. The facility's opening carries symbolic weight: it represents an industry scrambling to secure supply of a gas that most technology companies treated as guaranteed until late February.
Chip makers can only store about six weeks' worth of helium supply before it starts heating up, according to helium industry experts. Helium must be stored near absolute zero in liquid nitrogen-insulated containers. Once that insulation is depleted, the helium warms, expands into a gas, and becomes hazardous. This physical constraint means disruptions to supply chains translate into operational risk within weeks, not months.
The immediate crisis began in early March when Iran struck Qatar's Ras Laffan industrial complex, the world's largest liquefied natural gas facility. Roughly a third of global helium production is offline after Iran struck Qatar's largest liquefied natural gas facility earlier this month, damaging helium production lines that could take years to rebuild. QatarEnergy, one of the world's largest producers of natural gas, had declared force majeure to its customers, adding that helium is a byproduct of natural gas production.
Beyond the production shutdown itself, logistics present an equally vexing problem. Around 200 specialized containers used to transport liquid helium were stranded near the Strait of Hormuz when the war began, according to Phil Kornbluth, a helium industry consultant cited by the New York Times. He says that repositioning, refilling, and delivering those containers could take months. This creates a cascading delay layer on top of the production loss.
The industry's geographic concentration creates distinct winners and losers in the shortage. It's chip makers in South Korea that are particularly vulnerable to the shortage, because two-thirds of the country's helium imports came from Qatar last year. TSMC said it doesn't anticipate a significant impact at this time but is monitoring the situation, while Taiwanese thinktank director Arisa Liu reckons that the chip maker should have enough helium "for several months" at this time. Taiwan's position reflects better supply diversification than South Korea's concentrated exposure.
Air Liquide's response reflects pragmatic supply chain management. "With the situation in the Middle East and the attacks that happened last week on the natural gas field, there is today a shortage of helium," said Armelle Levieux, Air Liquide's group vice president. The company is in close contact with its customers and it is allocating helium from other places in the world. The Taichung facility, which sits near one of Taiwan's three ports equipped to handle liquefied natural gas and helium, positions Air Liquide to reallocate supplies more effectively across Asia's semiconductor belt.
The shortage exposes a structural vulnerability that governments and industry largely ignored until supply shocks forced attention. Helium is used at multiple stages of chip manufacturing, from cooling silicon wafers during lithography to flushing toxic chemical residue after cleaning. It's also got no viable substitute in fabbing processes. Unlike silicon or rare earths, where substitutes or recycling options exist, helium's unique physical properties mean manufacturers face difficult choices: they can pay sharply higher prices for limited supplies, throttle production, or both.
For now, industry leaders insist the immediate risk remains containable. But the timeline remains uncomfortably tight. Memory chip prices have already risen sharply amid booming AI demand, and any further supply constraint on helium could force chip makers to prioritise high-margin AI silicon over consumer products. Supply chain resilience, it turns out, depends on gases you never expected to worry about.