The Strait of Hormuz has been closed since March 4th following Iranian strikes on Qatar's Ras Laffan LNG facility, and the semiconductor industry is absorbing the consequences in real time. Spot helium prices have doubled. South Korea sourced 64.7% of its helium from Qatar in 2025; Taiwan's Gulf dependency sits at 69%. Those aren't hedged positions -- they are structural exposures the Semiconductor Industry Association warned about in 2023 and the industry chose to ignore.
Helium is not optional. EUV systems require ultra-pure helium for cooling and leak detection. Cleanroom carrier gas applications have no near-term substitute. When Ras Laffan goes offline the pipeline doesn't reroute -- it collapses. The second-order effects are equally damaging: Gulf air cargo hubs route precision instrumentation between Europe, Asia, and North America, and that capacity has cratered. Every slipped metrology tool delivery is a week of degraded defect detection on production wafers.
The deeper issue is DRAM allocation. Data centers are on track to consume 70% of global DRAM production by end of 2026, up from roughly 25% in 2022. Every wafer going into an HBM stack is capacity not available to consumer and industrial segments. In a market with slack that tradeoff is manageable. In the current environment it compounds every other constraint simultaneously. SK Hynix and Samsung have both flagged memory shortages into 2027.
This is the reckoning that was deferred after the pandemic. Taiwan remains the dominant geopolitical risk in semiconductor modeling, but Hormuz just demonstrated the chokepoints are more distributed -- a handful of helium facilities, Gulf cargo hubs, single-source specialty chemicals. The industry knew. The risk models reflected it. The mitigation didn't happen. Hardware teams building supply-chain assumptions into 2026-2027 product schedules need to revisit them now.