Running Out of Cold

Colder than deep space, on purpose

In Poughkeepsie, New York, IBM runs a pair of box-shaped modules that together stand more than eight feet tall and eight feet wide [1]. Inside, nested metal shields step down from room temperature like the layers of an onion, each one colder than the last. It takes under five days just to reach 4 kelvin. At the bottom, the system settles at about 15 thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, or 15 millikelvin [1].

That is far colder than the space between the stars. It has to be. IBM's qubits, the basic units of its quantum computers, are tiny superconducting circuits that only behave in a quantum way when almost every trace of heat is gone. IBM expects its Starling machine, planned for 2029, to need about a dozen of these linked modules [1].

The deepest stage of that cold comes from a machine called a dilution refrigerator. Its working fluid is helium.

Here is the surprise. Most of the helium that makes this cold possible comes out of natural gas fields. And in March 2026, about a third of the world's supply stopped flowing.

A gas nobody can make

Helium is the second most common element in the universe, yet on Earth it is scarce. It forms slowly from radioactive decay underground, gathers in some natural gas deposits and drifts off into space once released. In 2025 the world produced about 190 million cubic meters of it [2]. The United States was the largest producer. Qatar made about 63 million cubic meters, Russia 18 million and Algeria 11 million [2]. Qatar's helium is separated at the same giant plants that turn its natural gas into liquefied natural gas, or LNG [3].

Who uses it? According to the US Geological Survey, lab and analytical work took 22% of US consumption in 2025, semiconductors, fiber optics and controlled atmospheres 17% and MRI scanners 15% [2]. Quantum computing does not even get its own slice. Its demand is small in volume, but nothing else can do the job.

The rarer variety matters even more. A dilution refrigerator runs on a mixture of ordinary helium-4 and helium-3, a lighter isotope with one fewer neutron. Think of it as a cocktail: when the two kinds of helium separate at the coldest stage, helium-3 atoms crossing from one layer to the other soak up heat, a little like sweat evaporating from skin.

Helium-3 barely exists in natural gas. Most of the world's supply comes from the slow radioactive decay of tritium held in the US nuclear stockpile [8]. Policy analysts estimate that a single dilution refrigerator holds 10 to 100 liters of it and that the isotope can account for up to a quarter of the fridge's cost [9].

The year the cold got scarce

Several things happened in 2026 that turned a niche supply chain into front-page news.

• The shock. In early March 2026, during the conflict involving Iran, QatarEnergy halted production at its Ras Laffan LNG complex and declared force majeure [3]. On March 18–19, Iranian missile strikes damaged two of its liquefaction trains, about 17% of Qatar's LNG capacity. QatarEnergy said repairs could take up to five years and helium from those trains stops until then [4].
• The squeeze. By October, with shipping through the Strait of Hormuz disrupted, roughly one-third of global helium supply was cut off, CBS News reported [5]. Estimates of the spot-price increase range from a doubling to a tripling [3][5]. A University of Chicago lab that runs nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) magnets saw its deliveries cut to half of last year's [5].
• A policy response. On October 23, 2026, the US Department of Energy designated helium a "critical material," citing semiconductor manufacturing and the lack of practical substitutes [6]. Helium had been dropped from a federal list of critical minerals in 2022 [7].
• New sources of helium-3. The startup Interlune reports that in July 2026 it purified helium-3 to 99% from ordinary US helium using cryogenic distillation. It says the method, rolled out across US plants, could yield up to 2.5 kilograms a year [10]. Interlune also holds a DOE agreement to deliver 3 liters of helium-3 gathered from the Moon by April 2029 [11] and the fridge maker Bluefors has agreed to buy up to 10,000 liters a year from 2028 to 2037 [12].
• Machines that sip instead of gulp. Siemens Healthineers' MAGNETOM Flow MRI, cleared by the FDA in January 2026, seals in 0.7 liters of liquid helium for the scanner's life, the company says, versus more than 1,000 liters for conventional scanners [14]. Philips reports more than 1,500 BlueSeal scanners installed, each sealed with about 7 liters [15]. Labs are recapturing what boils off: the University of Edinburgh's recovery system cut its helium purchases by 89% [16].

The cold has an energy bill

The non-obvious part is that quantum computing's helium problem is really two problems and the bigger one may not be the gas itself.

The first is scale. A team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory estimates that a fault-tolerant superconducting quantum computer could need roughly 1 to 10 watts per qubit for cooling and control. At a million qubits, that means tens to hundreds of megawatts at a single site [17]. The same team warns that US helium-3 output in 2025 might supply only a small number of such large machines [17]. These are projections, not measurements. Still, they turn a laboratory curiosity into an energy question much like the one facing AI data centers.

The second is that alternatives exist, with trade-offs. Not every quantum computer needs millikelvin cold. Trapped-ion, neutral-atom and photonic machines avoid the dilution stage [13]. Helium-3-free magnetic refrigerators exist as well. Kiutra's demagnetization coolers run continuously below 30 millikelvin, but with only about 3 microwatts of cooling power at 50 millikelvin, compared with more than 30 microwatts at 20 millikelvin for a large dilution fridge [13]. Cooling power is the budget for heat leaking in through wires and electronics, so for now these suit smaller experiments rather than big processors.

Then there is the Moon. Lunar helium-3 is real on paper, but extraction has not been demonstrated beyond early excavation work. Interlune targets an extraction demo in 2027 and a pilot plant in 2029, while independent analysts do not expect commercial volumes before the early 2030s [13].

So the honest answer is mixed. The 2026 shock hit labs and hospitals first. Quantum computing's exposure is narrower, but harder to escape: today, nothing replaces helium-3 at the scale large superconducting machines will need.

Where the cold comes from

Two very different supply chains, one built on natural gas and one on a nuclear stockpile, meet inside every dilution refrigerator. The dashed box shows sources that companies plan but have not yet delivered at scale.

The last few thousandths of a degree

Go back to the boxes in Poughkeepsie. The coldest spot inside them depends on a gas pulled from the ground with natural gas and an isotope bred in a nuclear stockpile. In 2026, both supply lines proved more fragile than most people knew.

The response is already visible: a federal critical-material designation, scanners that need a fraction of the helium they once did, recovery systems, new isotope sources and coolers that skip helium-3 altogether. None of them solves the problem alone.

The takeaway is simple. Quantum computers are not just a software and physics story. They are an energy and materials story, too. We met the AI decoders that fix a quantum computer's errors in The Quantum Computer's Secret Partner and the chokepoints behind modern technology in The Narrow Waist of Everything. Helium belongs on that map.

Next in the series: the robots now lifting heavy solar panels in the desert and what they mean for the people beside them.