Helium-3, essential for quantum cooling, is so scarce that Bluefors signed a deal to mine it from the Moon

Helium-3 is required for the dilution refrigerators that cool superconducting quantum computers to operating temperatures below 10 millikelvin. But helium-3 does not exist in meaningful quantities in nature on Earth -- it comes almost entirely from the radioactive decay of tritium produced as a byproduct of nuclear weapons programs. Global supply is so constrained that in September 2025, Bluefors (the leading dilution refrigerator manufacturer) signed a contract with Interlune to purchase up to 10,000 liters of helium-3 per year extracted from the lunar surface, with deliveries starting in 2028. Why it matters: Because helium-3 supply depends on nuclear weapons program byproducts, the quantum computing industry's growth is literally coupled to geopolitics and nuclear policy, so any disruption -- sanctions, arms reduction treaties, or geopolitical conflicts -- could halt dilution refrigerator production, so new quantum computer installations would stop, so the entire superconducting quantum computing roadmap (IBM, Google, Rigetti, and dozens of startups) would be frozen in place, so the billions in quantum computing investment could be stranded by a supply chain vulnerability that has nothing to do with the technology itself. The structural root cause is that helium-3 production was never designed to serve the quantum computing industry -- it was an incidental byproduct of Cold War nuclear weapons manufacturing. As nuclear arsenals have been reduced and tritium production has declined, helium-3 supply has shrunk while quantum computing demand has grown. No commercially viable alternative production method exists at scale, and alternative cooling technologies (like Kiutra's magnetic cooling) are still in early development.