🎈Strait talk about helium

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While drivers across the US will already have seen gas prices shooting up because of the war in the Middle East, and may soon notice challenges getting hold of cheap Chinese imports — because something like 11% of all global trade traverses the narrow strait, per United Nations figures — there’s another problem ahead: helium supplies could be crimped because of the war.

• The alarm bells were rung by South Korean government officials last week, who cautioned that semiconductor production could be disrupted if key materials from the Middle East cannot be sourced, including helium. 

• Because it’s chemically inert and nonreactive, manufacturers use helium as a blanket and purge gas around silicon wafers to insulate the process from unwanted reactions as the wafers are etched.

• As AI interest peaked, so did demand for helium. The semiconductor industry overtook the previous biggest consumer of helium across industries — use in MRI machines — in October 2025, data from analytics firm TechCET shows.

Roughly a third of the world’s supply of helium comes from Qatar as a byproduct of the country’s massive liquefied natural gas (LNG) production, which itself is facing headaches trying to get its cargoes out of the Middle East and to the rest of the world.

The Takeaway

QatarEnergy halted production at its massive Ras Laffan facility — the planet’s biggest LNG export hub — after Iranian drone strikes in the early days of the conflict. Because no LNG tankers have been able to leave the region, producers are shutting their gas wells — meaning that the byproducts, like helium, aren’t entering the market either. Two of the country’s three helium plants are tied directly to LNG production, which means helium output depends on LNG continuing to flow through the strait.

Experts expect that in the coming weeks, major helium suppliers will start declaring force majeure with their customers, customers which as it stands are on the hook for a whole lot of chips that lots of large companies are counting on.

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Between 1998 and 2000, Jeremy Grantham was one of the few highly public skeptics from the world of finance urging investors to avoid internet-related shares, a contrarian stance. When the market ultimately collapsed in early 2000, GMO regained all it had lost and more, turning Grantham into something of a stock market celebrity. Now, he sees something on the AI horizon.

• Grantham argues that previously impregnable tech corporations — including Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet — are about to see their profits squeezed as never before, first by costs related to their simultaneous rush to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers, and later by the fact that the AI businesses they are building with those data centers will ultimately pit these market monsters against one another.

• That sort of head-to-head competition, while good for consumers, is all but certain to damage profits, he says. 

• Financial history, BCA Research’s Peter Berezin pointed out, is full of episodes where important, productivity-boosting inventions didn’t actually turn out to be profitable for the mass of companies and investors sinking capital into them. 

During the internet boom, tech company profits essentially went nowhere for years, Berezin said. And while stock prices soared, the ongoing lack of profitability eventually eroded investor confidence, contributing to the market crash.

The Takeaway

“These guys are overinvesting. They have no real prayer of making a handsome return on their investments. And they are moving into competition with each other,” Grantham said. “It’s like they’re digging trenches and getting the machine guns well oiled, aiming at each other. This is the kind of quiet before the storm, the phony war. But they’re lining up, ready for battle.” 

He added, “This is not how they got rich and happy.”

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A number of western US cities had their hottest winter on record last year, with ski meccas reporting record-low snowpacks. A chart of visits to Vail Resorts is looking as rocky as a ridgeline, as visits shrank 12.5% year over year amid the lack of powder. While the company is investing $100 million in artificial snowmaking, revenue from its primary mountainside moneymaker — lift passes — is slipping as snowbirds flock to fresher slopes. 

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• 📊 CPI: February’s reading of the Consumer Price Index showed that headline inflation rose 0.3% month on month, in line with economists’ estimates. Ahead of this release, prediction markets* had indicated roughly 50% odds that headline CPI would rise more than 0.2% month on month. Still, oil markets are making traders anxious, as event contracts are pricing in a 26% chance that CPI in May exceeds 0.5%. 

• ⛽ Gas: Gasoline hit $3.58 yesterday nationally, and prediction markets still think there’s room to run that price up. Currently there’s a 78% implied chance that gas finishes the month at $3.60 or higher, and a 45% chance it hits $4 a gallon nationally. 

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.

• Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan makes the case for bitcoin to hit $1 million in 10 years

• Papa John’s had its best day in over a year following a take-private offer from Qatari investment fund Irth Capital

• Once touted as a potential Google killer, Perplexity seems to have been left behind in the AI wars

• Elon Musk is blurring the boundaries of his companies even more with a joint xAI-Tesla AI agent project

• Meta is doubling down on custom inference chips after reportedly scrapping its most advanced AI training chip following design challenges

• Earnings expected from Dollar General, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Adobe, Ulta, and Lennar