China Just Learned One of America’s Oldest Tricks

Congress passed a law banning helium exports back in 1925.

They called it “a mineral resource pertaining to the national defense.”

And there was only one target in mind: Germany.

You see, Germany needed that helium for its airships to fly safely. 

Washington simply said no.

So when Nazi Germany came back a decade later, hoping to buy American helium for its zeppelin program, it got turned away again.

Deprived of that critical resource supply, Germany filled the Hindenburg with flammable hydrogen instead.

Well, you know how that story ends.

Today, more than a hundred years later, China is taking a page from our playbook. 

A couple weeks ago, an announcement came down from China’s Ministry of Commerce that was barely a dozen words long. 

It was called announcement #29.  

In that decree, the country imposed an immediate, temporary ban on helium exports. It doesn’t take much thought to understand who they’re targeting, too. 

Us.

Folks, we’ve moved way beyond zeppelins. 

This was a direct attack on America’s AI chip supply.

Here’s the part that should stop you cold…

China isn’t the world’s largest helium supplier, but they do import more of it than anyone else on the planet — more than 80% of what it uses comes from overseas.

This isn’t Beijing squeezing Washington, mind you. Rather, it’s Beijing panicking about its own chipmakers.

It’s the same instinct as our move in 1925. It’s just flipped this time. 

We restricted helium because we had it and didn’t want anyone else getting it; now China’s restricting it because it doesn’t have enough and refuses to be caught short.

Follow that chain, and it leads right back to a story we know all too well.

Up until recently, Qatar supplied roughly one-third of the world’s helium. 

Ever since Operation Epic Fury kicked off, Iran’s strikes on Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility in March didn’t just rattle the global oil and gas markets — they hit the helium supply chain too. 

Add in the disruptions through Hormuz, and you get spot helium prices in Northeast Asia hitting $150 to $205 per thousand cubic feet in June.

For the record, that’s nearly double what they were at the end of last year, and that was before China’s ban even landed.

Now think about why any of this matters to anyone with a dime in AI stocks. 

Remember that helium isn’t optional in chipmaking. It’s essential to EUV lithography cooling, wafer cooling, chemical vapor deposition, plasma etching. 

There’s no substitute for it, either. 

Intel warned us about exactly this time back in June — that helium (not power) could be the bottleneck nobody in the industry is ignoring.

It only took a few weeks before he was proven right.

Sound familiar? Well, it should. 

Why? Because this is the same shape as the transformer shortage we talked about recently — a physical constraint sitting quietly underneath the chip story, invisible until a project is already underway and suddenly can’t get what it needs.

This is the part where history really bites hard.

For most of the last century, we treated helium as too strategic to leave to the market, and the 1925 export ban was just the beginning. 

In fact, we built an entire Strategic Helium Reserve outside Amarillo, Texas — a literal underground stockpile, specifically so the country would never run short.

Then in 2024, Washington sold it to the Messer Group for $460 million… and just like that, the buffer was gone.

This kind of irony writes itself. You know, the one country that spent a century building a helium fortress and just handed over the keys, right as another country decided it needed one of its own.

Now, don’t get me wrong — power is still the biggest, most binding constraint on the AI buildout. 

Nothing about this helium crisis changes that fact. 

What it does is prove the pattern. 

Ans we’ve flagged four of these bottlenecks this year  — power, critical minerals, water, and helium.

They’re not competing stories, they’re stacking up on top of each other!

For us, that means the map keeps getting bigger.

A handful of small-cap North American helium developers — Pulsar Helium, Helix Exploration, Blue Star Helium, Avanti Helium, New Era Helium — are 12 to 24 months out from meaningful new supply.

Naturally, some are already up 150% to 300% this year on this exact story.

But let’s be honest with ourselves about the risk here. 

These are small, largely pre-revenue companies, which comes with the speculative volatility you might expect. In other words, they aren’t blue-chip trades. 

And we’re still in the early stages. 

However, early is where the money gets made, and it’s exactly the kind of physical-constraint we’ve been tracking all year. 

Power was the first crisis, and helium is next. 

Mark my words, there’ll be more.

Stay tuned. 

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