TD says power, not helium, will decide how fast Canada's AI buildout moves
A war-driven shutdown of the Middle East plant that supplies close to a third of the world's helium has opened a window for producers in Saskatchewan and Alberta.
According to TD Economics, the global race to build artificial intelligence infrastructure is widening it.
Helium has no substitute in semiconductor manufacturing, and semiconductors sit at the centre of the data-centre supply chain feeding the AI boom, said Mauri Hall, an economist at the bank, in an interview with BNN Bloomberg.
Roughly 30 percent of global output flows from Qatar's Ras Laffan complex, Hall noted, and that site has been knocked offline.
"This gives Canada an opportunity, or at least Saskatchewan and Alberta, an opportunity to expand their helium production and boost the global footprint of Canadian helium in the world," he told the outlet.
The disruption traces to March, when Iranian missile strikes hit Ras Laffan and QatarEnergy declared force majeure, taking about one-third of the world's helium supply out of the market, as per industrial-gas analysis compiled by Exiger and reporting from Arabian Gulf Business Insight.
Hall expects repairs to run a few years.
Independent assessments vary: consultancy AKAP Energy told AGBI that around 30 percent of Qatar's volumes, or roughly 11 percent of global supply, could be lost in 2026, while other trade coverage has flagged a portion of Qatari capacity potentially offline for up to five years.
Helium's role in chipmaking is well established.
It cools silicon wafers during etching and deposition, cools the superconducting magnets in EUV lithography tools, and serves as a leak-detection and carrier gas, with no viable alternative for most of those functions, according to research firm IDTechEx.
That research house projects semiconductor helium demand will rise more than fivefold by 2035.
Canada is positioned to benefit.
The country holds the world's fifth-largest helium reserves and lists the gas as a critical mineral, as per law firm Bennett Jones, which notes the US Geological Survey ranks the United States, Russia, Qatar and Algeria as the primary global suppliers.
Saskatchewan accounts for close to 3 percent of world supply and has set a target of 10 percent by 2030, a level the province says would generate $500m a year in exports, BNN Bloomberg reported in a separate May story.
The province ran its first Crown helium offering on June 22, raising $15.9m, according to the Government of Saskatchewan.
On the corporate side, North American Helium says it plans to bring an additional Saskatchewan facility online in the second half of 2026, and Royal Helium is targeting first production at its Climax project late this year, as per the companies.
For investors, the near-term signal is price rather than shortage.
Companies have already committed heavy capital to AI, so commodity constraints are unlikely to halt projects, Hall said.
"The bottlenecks on commodities, I think, will serve to make the build-out more expensive rather than slow it down," he told BNN Bloomberg.
The harder constraint is electricity.
"The biggest one is power," said Hall, who pointed to grid-connection queues and to gas turbines that are largely booked out to 2028.
That timeline squares with trade reporting from Natural Gas Intelligence, which found large-frame turbines sold out through 2028 as data-centre developers pivot to reciprocating engines.
"The lead times for power connection, whether you're looking to do it on grid or off grid, is constraining how fast these data centers can be built and energized," Hall said.
The United States runs the largest expansion pipeline and the biggest capital budgets but keeps hitting those supply-chain limits, according to Hall, while China moves faster because a top-down system can bypass regulation more easily than a democracy can.
Beijing, which relies entirely on imports, has signalled plans to accelerate domestic helium exploration, as per The Defense News.
Canada's own pipeline is large on paper.
A pitch deck prepared for Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Solomon put active AI data-centre capacity at about 337 megawatts, against more than 20 gigawatts "under planning or development," reported by The Canadian Press.
Solomon's office pushed back, calling the figure "a high-level, point-in-time snapshot" of announced and proposed private projects rather than a build forecast.
Ottawa's AI strategy separately estimates Canada will need 5.5 gigawatts of AI compute by 2030, according to the Globe and Mail.
The same report notes Hall sees the country's energy base as the draw, pointing to Alberta, where Meta broke ground in July on a $13bn, one-gigawatt data centre powered by natural gas, its largest outside the US.
The company's global capital spending will run between US$125bn and US$145bn this year.
Although the initial policy focus favoured low-emission power, that approach has shifted in some regions, Hall said: "I think Alberta has pulled back some of that specifically for data centers, so as to keep pace with the AI buildout."
Crucially, he argued, tapping prairie resources need not raise household bills, since abundant supply means meeting the load does not automatically push up consumer energy costs.
"There is certainly room for growth in Canada in the AI sector," Hall said.
