On April 13, the US Navy began enforcing a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz after peace talks between the US and Iran collapsed in Islamabad. The strait carries roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day. It also carries, or was carrying until now, copper, industrial gases, and the raw materials that have been quietly setting the pace of AI data center construction for the past two years.
The electrical equipment shortage in the US data center buildout predates the Iran conflict by several years. Transformer lead times for large power units have stretched to five years in some cases, and close to half of the data center projects planned for 2026 in the United States have been delayed or cancelled as a result. The immediate cause is a mismatch between surging demand from the AI buildout and a manufacturing base that was not designed for this scale. Hyperscalers are collectively projected to spend more than $650 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026. The grid and the equipment that feeds it cannot absorb that pace.
The blockade has found this supply chain at its most exposed. An estimated 40,000 tonnes of refined copper are now trapped inside the Persian Gulf. London Metal Exchange prices have passed $13,000 per tonne, with analysts projecting further pressure if the blockade holds. A single large data center site absorbs several thousand tonnes of copper; scaled across hundreds of planned facilities, the deficit was structural before accounting for the conflict at all.
The semiconductor layer faces a parallel disruption. Qatar supplies roughly a third of global helium, which is essential in chip fabrication lithography with no viable substitute under current manufacturing processes. Drone strikes on Qatar’s Ras Laffan facility in early March damaged production and triggered a 14 percent cut to annual helium exports, with repair timelines extending into years. South Korea formally warned that Samsung and SK Hynix face supply risk across 14 critical materials, including helium and bromine. Both companies have stated they hold sufficient inventory for the near term.
Prior to the blockade, Amazon signed a copper sourcing agreement with Rio Tinto securing 14,000 metric tonnes from a mine in Tucson, Arizona – domestic supply that does not pass through any contested waterway. That deal now looks prescient. Whether it is sufficient is a different question: at roughly 30 tonnes of copper per megawatt of installed capacity, the planned data center buildout requires volumes that no single sourcing agreement can insulate.
On the bright side, might this be considered accelerationist? Time will tell.
Sources: CNBC; Wood Mackenzie; Fortune
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team