Most people think of helium as party balloons and squeaky voices. But, that’s Helium 4. But there’s another kind — Helium-3 (³He) — that might decide who wins the race for energy, AI, and even civilization itself.
This is why the rare isotope known as ³He has become the focus of geopolitics. The race is on between the US and China to gain control of the largest known collection of ³He, which is found at the South Pole of the Moon. This is why China just blocked the export of the tools used to refine rare earths and ³He.
Helium-4 is the stuff of birthday balloons and funny squeaky voices: two protons, two neutrons, two electrons — stable, inert, and utterly boring, chemically speaking. When Helium -4, though, loses one neutron, it becomes Helium 3 and gains a superpower. It’s lighter, non-radioactive, and can fuel nuclear fusion — clean energy without producing nasty radioactive by-products. That’s when helium stops being a party gas and starts being a geopolitical issue. That tiny difference makes ³He the key to the next technological era. Fusion energy, quantum computing, superconductors, and advanced chips all need ³He. If you want to cool a quantum processor or an MRI magnet down to near absolute zero, you need ³He. If you're going to run the fusion reactors that could power data centers and AI, you need ³He. You can’t make it in a lab, so far. You harvest it at scale in one place - the moon.
As the BBC put it, “Helium is a magical element. There is nothing else like it in the Universe.” They’re right. Liquid helium becomes a superfluid at near-zero temperatures — it flows without friction. Stir a cup of superfluid helium, and it would theoretically keep spinning forever. It’s this strange property that allows superconductors, MRI machines, and fusion reactors to exist at all.
You need ³He to do nuclear fusion. Think about it. Altman, Gates, and Musk are “all in” on nuclear fusion, which means they are “all in” on ³He. ³He is incredibly rare on Earth because our atmosphere lets solar wind escape. But the Moon’s surface has soaked up billions of years of solar wind, embedding ³He in its dust (regolith). Mining it could, in theory, supply humanity with clean, near-limitless fusion energy. Also, ³He is necessary for the cryogenic systems for quantum and nano computing. It’s also used in cryogenics as applied to MRI scanners, superconducting magnets, semiconductor lithography, and rocketry. As the BBC points out, “The biggest users on earth are hospitals” (32% of the global market) because it is essential to the magnets used in MRI scanners. It is even essential to the gas that inflates car safety bags. To achieve the absolute zero required for producing MRI scanners and nuclear fusion, you need dilution refrigerators that can reach ultra-low temperatures. That means temperatures below 10 millikelvin (mK) (273.14C or -459.65F). You need ³He. But, unlike most gases, ³He can’t be synthetically produced. There is no viable substitute for ³He that can currently replicate this extreme cooling effect at the required scale. So, you need ³He to get to fusion, quantum, chips and AGI. The stakes could not be higher. Helium 4 -filled birthday balloons make birthdays more fun. ³He, in contrast, can make civilization sustainable, which means a lot more birthdays for humanity.
The main source of ³He on Earth is the radioactive decay of tritium (³H), which is a byproduct of making nuclear weapons. That’s why ³He is sometimes called a “daughter product” of tritium (³H). To be clear, ³He ≠ ³H, but it is a byproduct of it. But, America is not making nuclear weapons the way it used to, though the Department of Energy is now making a new class of nukes called B61-13 gravity bombs (someone else with more expertise than me can explain whether these will produce the ³He we need). As an aside, Tritium costs $30,000 a gram.
The Most Expensive Substances Estimated Price per Gram:
1️⃣ Antimatter (Positronium) ~$62.5 trillion. Can only be produced atom by atom in particle accelerators; vanishes instantly on contact with matter.
2️⃣ Californium-252 ~$27 million. Synthetic radioactive element used in neutron radiography and nuclear reactors.
3️⃣ Diamond (Flawless, lab-grade) ~$65,000. Extreme demand, precision cutting, and optical purity for industrial/scientific use.