America’s AI Advantage Runs into Trouble in the Strait of Hormuz

By Piers Nash

The head of U.S. Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper, said in March that American forces were using advanced AI tools in Operation Epic Fury to compress processes that once took hours or days into seconds. In the first twenty-four hours, U.S. forces struck more than a thousand targets. Systems such as Palantir’s Maven Smart System are now close enough to the targeting cycle that they shape tempo, not just analysis. The war is therefore demonstrating something important in real time: AI is no longer a future military advantage. It is part of the present one.

It is therefore worth paying close attention to the fact that the same war demonstrating AI’s strategic value is simultaneously exposing just how brittle the material supply chain beneath AI really is. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz since February 28, combined with physical destruction of production infrastructure across the Gulf, has disrupted the supply of helium, specialty chemicals, energy feedstocks, and critical metals to semiconductor fabrication facilities worldwide. The current AI buildout, in both commercial planning and defense procurement, has been priced and scheduled as if access to those inputs were stable. That assumption, as of early April, no longer holds. What has not yet received adequate attention is what this means, concretely, for the trajectory of American AI capability and the broader competitive position it supports.

Material Constraints

The most immediate and least substitutable disruption is helium. Qatar produces roughly a third of the world’s supply as a byproduct of liquefied natural gas processing at the Ras Laffan Industrial City. Iranian drone strikes knocked that facility offline on March 2. Phil Kornbluth, president of Kornbluth Helium Consulting, estimates a minimum two-to-three-month production shutdown and four-to-six months before the supply chain returns to normal, even if the conflict ended immediately. Reporting cited by Entrepreneur, drawing on New York Times coverage, indicates that the damage to helium production lines could take years to fully rebuild. Helium is used in wafer cooling, plasma etching, leak detection, and chemical residue flushing across the semiconductor fabrication process, and researchers at South Korea’s Sangmyung University have stated plainly that no viable alternative exists for wafer cooling, because helium’s combination of thermal conductivity, chemical inertness, and atomic size is unique among all elements. Spot prices have surged 40 to 100 percent. Roughly 200 specialized transport containers were stranded near the Strait when the war began, and chip makers can only store about six weeks of supply before the liquid helium warms beyond usability. The Semiconductor Industry Association warned the USGS in 2023 that a helium disruption would produce “shocks to the global semiconductor manufacturing industry.” We are now inside the disruption they warned about.

This is the second major industrial gas crisis to hit the semiconductor supply chain in four years. In 2022, the Ukraine war disrupted neon, krypton, and xenon, noble gases essential for the excimer lasers used in photolithography. The industry adapted through recycling, stockpiling, and the shift to extreme ultraviolet lithography, which does not require neon. The current shock is broader, and it arrives before the industry has finished working through earlier bottlenecks in advanced packaging, memory, and energy. Advanced packaging was already tight before the war: TSMC’s CoWoS capacity was effectively sold out into 2026, leaving the industry with little slack even before helium and energy constraints intensified.

Beyond helium, the convergence of constraints is striking in its breadth. Bromine, used in memory-chip production, is another pressure point; South Korea’s industry ministry has already warned that bromine sits among the semiconductor inputs for which the country remains heavily exposed to the Middle East. Gallium, critical for compound semiconductors including GaN and GaAs components, presents a different geometry. China remains the dominant global supplier, and although Beijing suspended its outright export ban last November, gallium still sits inside a licensing regime that leaves U.S. access exposed to political discretion, while the ban on exports to U.S. military end users remains in force. The Hormuz closure then compounded the problem from a different direction entirely: gallium is recovered as a byproduct of aluminum refining, and major Gulf smelters including Aluminium Bahrain and Norsk Hydro’s Qatalum facility declared force majeure after gas supplies were suspended. Taiwan, home to TSMC’s most important fabs, had been sourcing roughly a third of its LNG from Qatar before scrambling for alternatives after the war began.

What Has Already Happened

The public record of downstream consequences is still developing, and intellectual honesty requires distinguishing between what is documented, what is in transit, and what is analytical projection. The upstream disruptions are established fact. The midstream impacts are beginning to appear. On March 26, Jerry Zhang, China sales head at Swiss semiconductor components firm VAT, told Reuters that the helium tightening was “already affecting production” at his and other companies. An Air Liquide executive warned the same week of a short-term helium shortage. South Korea’s Ministry of Trade launched an investigation into 14 semiconductor materials with high dependence on Middle Eastern sources. TSMC and GlobalFoundries have both stated they are monitoring the situation but do not yet anticipate significant operational impact.

The war has also hit AI infrastructure directly. AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes on March 1, with Amazon confirming structural damage, power disruption, and water damage from fire suppression, and warning that recovery would be “prolonged.” Meta paused work on part of its 2Africa subsea cable. These matter less as a separate argument than as evidence that the war is reaching beyond commodities and into compute infrastructure itself.

What has not yet appeared in public reporting is a named U.S. weapons program delayed by these shortages. That absence should not be comforting. Reuters has already reported early production effects from helium tightening, while major foundries still say the impact is manageable for now. The more likely pattern is lag rather than immunity: upstream shortages first tighten inventories and delivery times, then force prioritization decisions at the fab level. That matters for defense because the Pentagon depends heavily on current-generation and mature-node chips to sustain existing weapons systems, exactly the categories most likely to lose allocation in a market that protects high-margin AI accelerators first.

Triage and Its Consequences

When semiconductor manufacturers face constrained inputs, they triage, and the logic is straightforward: scarce helium, scarce energy, and scarce packaging capacity flow toward the products that command the highest margins. In the current market, those products are AI accelerators, high-bandwidth memory, and advanced logic chips for data center applications. Consumer electronics, automotive semiconductors, industrial controllers, and standard memory absorb the shortfall. Chipmakers facing helium constraints will prioritize AI-related products first, with consumer electronics and industrial applications bearing the earliest cuts. For the defense industrial base, which competes for allocation of precisely those deprioritized categories, the squeeze arrives at a moment when munitions supply chains are already strained by the demands of Ukraine and now the Iran conflict itself.

The competitive dimension sharpens further when you consider who controls the alternative supply. China remains the dominant producer of gallium, maintains a licensing regime that can be tightened at will, and is less dependent on the Strait of Hormuz for energy and petrochemical inputs than American and allied manufacturers are. The convergence of Chinese export controls and the Hormuz closure create a structural asymmetry in which the two largest supply-side pressures on the global chip industry both disproportionately constrain U.S. and allied production capacity while leaving Chinese fabrication comparatively less affected. That is worrisome and not easily cured.

The CHIPS and Science Act allocated $52.7 billion to expand domestic semiconductor manufacturing, and the investments in TSMC’s Arizona fabs, Intel’s Ohio buildout, and Samsung’s Texas expansion represent real progress toward reducing geographic concentration risk at the fabrication stage. But the Act does not address the upstream material supply chains those fabs require to operate. You can build a fab in Arizona, but if the helium comes from Qatar, the bromine comes from Jordan, the gallium is subject to Chinese licensing, and the energy feedstocks transit the Strait of Hormuz, you have relocated the building without in any way relocating the vulnerability.

What Follows

The United States has no strategic reserves for helium, bromine, or any semiconductor-grade industrial gas. It sold down its strategic helium stockpile under the 1996 Privatization Act. There is no coordinated international mechanism for emergency release of the materials that actually constrain chip production. The institutional architecture built over five decades to manage oil shocks has no equivalent for the inputs that determine whether fabs run or sit idle. The same chokepoint is also tightening fertilizer markets and threatening food security across import-dependent economies, a reminder that these material shocks will certainly not remain confined to semiconductors and that the instability they generate in fragile states feeds back into precisely the kind of geopolitical friction that produces future supply disruptions.

The Iran war has shown two things at once. It has shown that AI now matters at operational speed, and it has shown that the material base required to sustain that advantage is narrower and more fragile than U.S. policy has treated it. Strategic reserves for critical semiconductor inputs, more diversified supply chains for industrial gases and specialty chemicals, and a policy framework that treats chip-material security as a national-security problem rather than a procurement footnote are no longer optional. They are part of the price of sustaining an AI advantage in a world where supply chains have become battlefields.

Piers Nash is a Senior Director at Farmers Insurance leading AI initiatives. Previously, he served as AVP of Advanced Analytics and Generative AI at Horace Mann and spent a decade on faculty at the University of Chicago, where he directed the National Cancer Institute’s Genomic Data Commons. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a PhD in biochemistry and has four U.S. patents and more than fifty peer-reviewed publications. The views expressed here are his own.

This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire.