In 1925 Congress made helium a federal responsibility. Airships needed a lifting gas that would not burn, and the United States held most of the world's known supply in the natural gas fields of the Texas Panhandle. The federal helium program that began that year, the Bureau of Land Management recalls, existed "to ensure that helium would be available for defense needs." Its storage field near Amarillo became the Federal Helium Reserve. Ninety-nine years later the government finished leaving the business: on 27 June 2024 the BLM closed the sale of the Federal Helium System to Messer, the step the Helium Stewardship Act of 2013 required.
Twenty-eight months after that sale, Washington has put helium back on a federal list. On 27 October 2026 the Department of Energy published "Critical Material List; Addition of Helium" in the Federal Register, 91 FR 67558, FR Doc. 2026-21884. Among the uses it names is quantum computing. The notice fills one page of the Federal Register. Its dates tell most of the story.
Practical takeaway. DOE added helium to its Critical Material List by a notice signed on 21 October and published on 27 October 2026, with no comment period. The notice names quantum computing as a function for which helium cannot be substituted, but its stated justification is semiconductor manufacturing for AI and data-center supply chains, and it does not mention helium-3, the isotope that the coldest quantum hardware depends on.
How DOE's Critical Material List grew from 2020 to 27 October 2026
The list rests on section 7002(a)(2) of the Energy Act of 2020, codified at 30 U.S.C. 1606(a)(2). A critical material is any non-fuel mineral, element, substance or material that the Secretary of Energy determines "has high risk for supply chain disruption and serves an essential function in one or more energy technologies." On 4 August 2023 DOE published its final determination on the 2023 Critical Materials List, 88 FR 51792. That list named 18 critical materials for energy, from aluminum and cobalt to electrical steel and silicon carbide, alongside the 50 critical minerals on the US Geological Survey's 2022 list. Helium was on neither.
The first addition came on 22 May 2025, when metallurgical coal for steelmaking joined the list. The helium notice is the second. It was signed on 21 October 2026 by Audrey Robertson, Assistant Secretary of the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, filed on 26 October and published the next morning. As a notice of designation it carries no comment period. Being on the list makes a material eligible for the research, development and supply-chain programs that section 7002 directs DOE to run.
What 91 FR 67558 says about helium, chips and AI infrastructure
The summary states that helium "is non-substitutable for multiple critical energy functions, including: semiconductor manufacturing, leak testing natural gas infrastructure, and quantum computing, along with being essential to key medical/scientific applications." The body then gives one reason. The assessment, the notice says, "concludes that helium is needed globally for semiconductor manufacturing and other key energy applications," and "building U.S. SI infrastructure will require expansion of semiconductor production." The abbreviation is explained by the signed copy that DOE posted on its own site, which ties the step to Executive Order 14141 on AI infrastructure (January 2025) and to Executive Order 14434, "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence", published on 2 October 2026. SI stands for superintelligence. The version printed on page 67558 of the Federal Register cites America's AI Action Plan and the AI-infrastructure order in its footnotes instead.
The paperwork around that reason is thin. The notice points to DOE's critical-materials page for the assessment; on 27 October the helium document linked there reproduced the notice text, with no separate quantitative assessment of supply, demand or import exposure. Nothing in either text limits the designation's legal effect. The thin record does mean the public cannot yet read DOE's analysis of helium supply for itself.
Which quantum machines need helium, and why helium-3 is a separate supply
Quantum computing appears once, in the summary, with no figure attached. The hardware behind the phrase is specific. Superconducting processors and most spin-qubit processors operate at a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero inside dilution refrigerators. A dilution refrigerator cools by circulating a mixture of helium-3 and helium-4, and the pre-cooling stages and many lab cryostats also draw on helium-4. The two isotopes come from different places. Helium-4 is separated from natural gas, which is why the BLM ran its reserve in the gas country of Texas. Helium-3 is far rarer. According to the DOE Isotope Program, the department's helium-3 is a byproduct of tritium decay, separated during tritium processing at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and an interagency group sets priorities for federal use and for allocating the existing inventory.
The notice says "helium" throughout. The designation is unqualified, so nothing in the text confines it to helium-4. What the notice lacks is isotope-specific analysis: its stated justification concerns the bulk helium that chip fabs, hospital MRI scanners and leak-testing crews share, and it says nothing about helium-3 supply, the scarcer input for millikelvin quantum hardware. For quantum builders that missing analysis matters most. A dilution refrigerator keeps its helium mixture in a closed circuit, and modern dry systems use pulse-tube coolers in place of liquid-helium baths, so a working machine does not consume helium-3 day to day. The pressure comes with growth: every new refrigerator needs its own charge, which makes helium-3 for dilution refrigerators a potential constraint on how fast the superconducting fleet can expand whenever available and recovered supplies fall short of new demand.
Not every architecture sits behind that ceiling. Trapped-ion and neutral-atom machines are held in vacuum chambers and do not need dilution refrigerators for their qubits, and room-temperature diamond processors avoid cryogenics for the qubits altogether. Quentir covered one such case in its Defense Monitor read of how Quantum Brilliance and Oak Ridge ran fragment-based quantum chemistry across three room-temperature diamond processors. A helium designation therefore lands unevenly across the quantum industry, with the heaviest weight on the superconducting route.
Who else depends on the same helium: hospitals, fabs and pipeline crews
The notice's phrase "essential to key medical/scientific applications" covers the most familiar use. Most MRI scanners keep their superconducting magnets cold in a bath of liquid helium; the USGS helium statistics carry the federal series on production and use. Semiconductor fabs use helium as a cooling and carrier gas. Gas utilities use it to find leaks. A quantum laboratory, a hospital radiology department and a pipeline maintenance crew thus draw on one commodity whose federal stockpile was sold in 2024 and which DOE now calls a supply-chain risk.
That shared dependence carries a civic stake. When helium tightens, hospitals feel it in the cost of keeping scanners running, and research groups feel it in delayed experiments. The notice names medical uses in its summary and argues its case from chips and AI.
How Quentir Reads It
The helium notice belongs to a pattern Quentir has followed this autumn: quantum hardware now appears inside general industrial-policy instruments written for other purposes. Treasury's outbound investment proposal reached quantum algorithms through a security program; the DOE list reaches quantum cooling through an energy statute. Quentir has argued that quantum industrial policy had acquired real coordinates in specific sites and programs. Helium adds a commodity to that map, and the commodity splits along a line the notice does not draw. The unqualified helium designation now coexists with the DOE Isotope Program's existing helium-3 distribution and interagency allocation, and the notice does not explain how the two will be coordinated.
Two things will show how much the designation means for quantum computing. The first is whether DOE publishes the helium assessment the notice relies on, with supply and import figures a builder could plan against. The second is whether DOE's critical-materials office and its Isotope Program say anything together about helium-3 for quantum computing. Until then the notice is a formal federal statement that quantum computers cannot do without helium, attached to a justification that discusses chips.
The documents behind this read, from the 2023 list to the June 2024 helium sale and Treasury's quantum outbound rule, sit together in Quentir's archive. The All-access membership opens that archive in one subscription, including the Signature Briefs and Signature Reports.
Sources: US Department of Energy, Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, Critical Material List; Addition of Helium, 91 FR 67558, FR Doc. 2026-21884, signed 21 October 2026, published 27 October 2026; US Department of Energy, Notice of Final Determination on 2023 DOE Critical Materials List, 88 FR 51792, 4 August 2023; US Department of Energy, What Are Critical Materials and Critical Minerals? (page and linked signed helium notice checked 27 October 2026); Executive Order 14434, Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence, published 2 October 2026; DOE Isotope Program, Supply and Demand of Helium-3; Bureau of Land Management, BLM completes sale of Federal Helium System, 27 June 2024, and Helium program page; US Geological Survey, National Minerals Information Center, Helium Statistics and Information. Energy Act of 2020, section 7002(a)(2), Pub. L. 116-260, div. Z, 30 U.S.C. 1606(a)(2), as quoted in the notice.
Published intelligence, built to inform your own decisions. Published: October 27, 2026.