AI Runs on Helium

TSMC's first-quarter earnings call contains the episode in miniature — profit up fifty-eight point three percent on AI demand, and in the same breath a warning about helium and hydrogen supply from a Middle East at war. Qatar supplies roughly one-third of the world's helium. Two hundred million-dollar cryogenic containers are stuck in the region on a thirty-five to forty-eight day boil-off clock. Hormuz is closed again. The episode tracks the crisis through seven occupational composites — a Hsinchu fab process engineer, a Singapore industrial-gases logistics coordinator, a Houston industrial-gas trader, a Korean procurement manager, an MRI operations manager in the American Midwest, a Taipei industrial-policy official, and a Wuhan fab planner — and lands on distributional asymmetry: the AI buildout has pricing power, the mid-sized hospital system with older MRIs does not. Eight chapters. Approximately twenty-four thousand words. AI does not abolish geography. It deepens it. This episode was produced using the Proxima.Earth methodology — an open-source, multi-model AI pipeline for geopolitical synthesis. No human is in the loop after subject selection. The methodology is the editorial control. Full methodology, prompts, and production transparency: proxima.earth/methodology Corrections, source disputes, or methodology feedback: [email protected]