{"slug": "us-energy-department-designates-helium-a-critical-material-for-chipmaking", "title": "US Energy Department designates helium a critical material for chipmaking", "summary": "Energy Secretary Chris Wright designated helium a critical material on October 23 under authority from the Energy Act of 2020, making helium the 20th material on the federal critical materials list alongside lithium, cobalt and rare earths, the Department of Energy announced. The DOE cited helium's lack of substitutes in cooling superconducting magnets in MRI machines, removing heat from silicon wafers during chip fabrication, and leak detection in semiconductor and aerospace vacuum chambers. The designation follows US domestic helium production falling from roughly 82 million cubic meters in 2020 to about 68 million cubic meters in 2024 and QatarEnergy cutting annual helium exports by 14% after Iranian missile strikes damaged Ras Laffan Industrial City facilities tied to roughly a third of world supply, with repairs expected to take three to five years.", "body_md": "*Seven months after an Iranian strike hit Qatar's helium plant and exposed how fragile that supply line is, Washington is finally treating the gas like it matters. Helium is now the 20th material on a federal list that comes with real money and faster permits.*\n\nEnergy Secretary Chris Wright designated helium as a critical material on October 23, under authority granted by the Energy Act of 2020, according to a Department of Energy announcement reported by the Associated Press. The move puts a gas that most people associate with birthday balloons on the same federal list as lithium, cobalt and rare earths, the materials Washington has spent the past several years trying to secure for chipmaking, defense and clean energy. Helium becomes the 20th material on that list. Metallurgical coal, used in steelmaking, was the last addition, in 2025. The only other gas already on it is fluorine.\n\nThe DOE's reasoning is specific and, for once, not overstated: helium has no real substitute in the processes that matter most to it. It cools the superconducting magnets in MRI machines. It carries heat away from silicon wafers during fabrication, which is why chip fabs treat it as an operating necessity rather than a nice-to-have. It is also the standard gas for leak detection in the vacuum chambers that semiconductor and aerospace manufacturing depend on, because its atoms are small enough to find defects that other gases simply pass over. None of that is new information. What changed is that Washington decided, in writing, that it counts.\n\nHelium's path onto a federal critical list has been unusually bumpy. The Interior Department put it on a critical minerals list in 2018, then dropped it in 2021, on the logic that the US was still a net helium exporter. That logic aged badly. US domestic helium production fell from roughly 82 million cubic meters in 2020 to about 68 million cubic meters in 2024, even as demand from chipmakers and medical imaging kept climbing. Avanti Helium Corp, a Montana-focused producer, had been petitioning the federal government since September 2025 to reverse course and put helium back on a critical list, citing exactly that production decline.\n\nThen came March 2026. Iranian missile strikes on Qatar's Ras Laffan Industrial City, reported by the Boston Globe and others at the time, caused what QatarEnergy itself called \"extensive\" damage to facilities tied to roughly a third of the world's helium supply. QatarEnergy cut its annual helium exports by 14% and told customers repairs could take three to five years. Qatar alone had been producing something like 63 million cubic meters of helium a year, close to a third of global output, so losing even a slice of that for half a decade is not a rounding error. It is the kind of shock that makes a government start writing new lists.\n\n[Trump declares a grid emergency to protect the AI boom and may slow it down instead](https://startupfortune.com/trump-declares-a-grid-emergency-to-protect-the-ai-boom-and-may-slow-it-down-instead/)\n\nExecutive Order 14420 lets the Energy Department block Chinese-made grid gear already installed nationwide, but BloombergNEF says over 23 gigawatts of battery storage projects now face delay while rules stay unwritten until December 24. - [Trump grid emergency AI data centers need](https://startupfortune.com/trump-declares-a-grid-emergency-to-protect-the-ai-boom-and-may-slow-it-down-instead/) - [national emergency foreign equipment power grid sabotage](https://startupfortune.com/trump-declares-a-grid-emergency-to-protect-the-ai-boom-and-may-slow-it-down-instead/)\n\nThat timeline matters more than the designation itself. The chip industry has spent 2026 absorbing one supply shock after another: CXMT's memory chaos, the scrapped Solidigm Nasdaq listing, GPU allocation fights between hyperscalers. Helium is the input that sits underneath all of it and gets none of the attention, because nobody puts a helium shortage in an earnings call headline. It shows up instead as a fab running a leak-detection step with less margin for error, or a wafer-cooling line that can't get its usual delivery schedule.\n\nA critical material designation under the Energy Act of 2020 is not symbolic. It opens the door to federal financing support for producers, puts the material under closer DOE monitoring, and generally makes it easier for projects tied to that material to move through permitting and qualify for incentives tied to critical-materials programs. For a commodity where US output has been shrinking while a third of global supply sits offline for years, that is a meaningful lever, even if it won't fix anything by next quarter.\n\nTwo small US producers are positioned to feel this first. Desert Mountain Energy, trading on the TSX Venture Exchange, has spent 2026 expanding its footprint in Arizona's Holbrook Basin, adding another 12,219 acres of helium leases in June around its original discovery well. Avanti Helium is building out its Sweetgrass project in Montana. Neither company is a household name, and neither is going to replace a third of global supply on its own. But both have spent the better part of a year lobbying for exactly the designation that just landed, and a federal list that unlocks financing and faster permits is the kind of thing that moves a project from a lease filing to an actual well.\n\nNone of this solves the Qatar problem. QatarEnergy's own timeline puts meaningful repairs three to five years out, which means the supply hole that opened in March is going to outlast several more chip cycles. What the designation does is tell American helium producers, belatedly, that Washington now treats their output the same way it treats lithium or cobalt. For an industry that has been running its most sensitive manufacturing step on a gas nobody was tracking, that is a start, not a fix.\n\n**Also read:** [Instacart explores a sale to Uber or DoorDash at a fraction of its old price](https://startupfortune.com/instacart-explores-a-sale-to-uber-or-doordash-at-a-fraction-of-its-old-price/) • [Coinbase will make USDC the default stablecoin on 82 million Galaxy phones](https://startupfortune.com/coinbase-will-make-usdc-the-default-stablecoin-on-82-million-galaxy-phones/) • [Moonshot AI releases Kimi K3.1 Pro open weight model to rival Claude](https://startupfortune.com/moonshot-ai-releases-kimi-k31-pro-open-weight-model-to-rival-claude/)\n\n*This article is posted in [Technology News](https://startupfortune.com/category/technology/), check it out for more related stories.*\n\n## Join the discussion\n\n[Open in the community →](https://startupfortune.com/community/)\n\nAlmost there. Sign in and your reply posts straight away.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/us-energy-department-designates-helium-a-critical-material-for-chipmaking", "canonical_source": "https://startupfortune.com/us-energy-department-designates-helium-a-critical-material-for-chipmaking/", "published_at": "2026-10-23 23:03:13+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-23 23:13:28.265387+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-chips", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Department of Energy", "Chris Wright", "QatarEnergy", "Ras Laffan Industrial City", "Avanti Helium Corp", "Energy Act of 2020", "Interior Department"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/us-energy-department-designates-helium-a-critical-material-for-chipmaking", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/us-energy-department-designates-helium-a-critical-material-for-chipmaking.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/us-energy-department-designates-helium-a-critical-material-for-chipmaking.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/us-energy-department-designates-helium-a-critical-material-for-chipmaking.jsonld"}}