Helium-3 doesn't make headlines the way rare earths or lithium do, but it may be the tightest resource bottleneck facing quantum computing today — and the numbers behind it are stark enough to explain why. Here's what helium-3 is, how the supply math actually works, what the United States and India are each betting on it, and where ORBITBeyond fits into what comes next.
Why Helium-3
Most helium used in industry and medicine — the helium-4 that fills MRI magnets and party balloons — is common enough to extract from natural gas. Helium-3 is a different animal entirely. It barely exists in nature on Earth, and it can't simply be pumped or mined faster to meet demand: functionally, the entire usable supply is produced as a byproduct of a slow, tightly controlled industrial process tied to maintaining nuclear material stockpiles — a process that runs at its own pace, regardless of price.
That scarcity matters because helium-3 sits at the centre of two very different frontiers. It's the working fluid inside dilution refrigerators — the machines that cool quantum processors to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, the only regime in which today's qubits hold their state. Separately, it has long been discussed as a near-ideal fusion fuel, prized for producing energy with far less residual radioactivity than conventional alternatives. The Moon, unshielded by an atmosphere, has spent billions of years absorbing a steady rain of solar wind — and with it, a resource that on Earth is measured in litres.
Quantifying the Squeeze
Global Helium-3: Supply Ceiling vs. Projected 2030 Demand
Each dilution refrigerator can require anywhere from several dozen to several hundred litres of helium-3. As quantum computing research facilities multiply across the US, Europe, China, and Japan, cumulative demand from that segment alone is projected to nearly double today's entire global production ceiling — before fusion research or any other use draws on the same limited stockpile.
United States: Betting Big, Buffer Shrinking
The US quantum computing market is projected to grow nearly five-fold this decade, and every one of those systems needs cooling. NASA, meanwhile, is the country's single largest consumer of helium in its own right, using tens of millions of cubic feet a year to purge and pressurise the liquid hydrogen and oxygen systems that get rockets off the ground.
The supply side isn't keeping pace. The federal helium reserve that has backstopped American supply since the 1920s is scheduled to run completely dry within about a year, with no replacement authorised. The Department of Defense has already started treating this as a security question rather than a market one, issuing a request for proposals worth close to three billion dollars over 15 years in January 2026 to lock in long-term helium supply.
India: Scaling Fast, Importing Everything
India's National Quantum Mission — Qubit Scaling Roadmap
Source: India's National Quantum Mission (Dept. of Science & Technology), ₹6,003.65 crore (~$730M) committed 2023–2031. Each qubit generation requires its own dilution-refrigerator infrastructure — and with it, its own helium-3 draw.
The supply side tells a very different story. India imports essentially all of its helium, with a single overseas supplier accounting for more than half of it, while national reserves amount to little more than a week's buffer. There is effectively no domestic helium-3 production base to draw on as that qubit roadmap scales.
The Future
Both roadmaps point in the same direction, on roughly the same timeline. Published NASA planning for a phased Moon Base build-out lays out a decade-long programme running from the late 2020s into the mid-2030s — tens of billions of dollars in committed investment, dozens of landers, rovers, and surface habitats scheduled phase by phase. Whatever else it proves, that roadmap confirms the hardware and cadence needed to reach the lunar surface routinely — and eventually bring material home — is being built this decade.
Private industry has already started positioning to capture the opportunity. Companies such as Interlune have begun developing dedicated hardware for extracting helium-3 — both from lunar soil and from processing terrestrial helium more efficiently — treating it as a founding resource for a much larger commercial space economy rather than a speculative premise.
Where ORBITBeyond Fits
As a company built around NASA's own lunar exploration programme, this is not an abstract trend for us. Extraction is only half the problem — whoever mines helium-3 on the Moon still has to move it reliably, repeatedly, and cost-effectively from the lunar surface to the markets that need it most, the US and India among them. That is fundamentally a transportation and infrastructure challenge, which is exactly the layer ORBITBeyond is built to serve.
Our lander platforms, surface power and data services, and planned mission cadence are designed for the kind of recurring, dependable lunar logistics a future helium-3 supply chain would require — and our Odisha facility positions India not just as a customer for this resource, but as a potential hub for the infrastructure that brings it home.
The supply gap in the numbers above is a preview of a much larger resource question the next decade will have to answer. We think the Moon — and the transportation network connecting it to Earth — will be part of that answer.
Sources: IDSA issue brief, "A Helium Shock to India's Quantum Technology Ambitions"; Interlune; NASA Moon Base infrastructure planning; India's National Quantum Mission (Dept. of Science & Technology); public market research on US and global quantum computing and helium-3 markets; public reporting on the US Federal Helium Reserve and Department of Defense helium supply procurement.