The War with Iran is making it harder to find essential components for our technology.

For American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

The war with Iran has upended supply chains, including for materials that are critical to building the electronics we use every day.

Certain kinds of plastic, copper, and even the gas helium are all essential to building our technology.

We're now dealing with shortages of all of them.

I talked about this with Jeff Janokowitz, an analyst

with the research firm IDC. While there's not a lot of actual manufacturing in the Middle East,

what we do see is a lot of the raw materials, whether we're talking about natural gases or

other types of raw materials are actually manufactured in that region. And that's now having a bit of a ripple effect across the overall semiconductor industry.

Yeah.

Can you give me an example of something that's a critical part of our technology that's now in short supply?

Yeah.

Well, you mentioned helium, and helium is certainly one of those aspects that is a bit of a challenge.

As part of the war, one of the manufacturing facilities in

Qatar was hit. And as a result, we're seeing price spikes on helium go up between 50 and 100 percent

versus where they were pre the war. And that's a core material that's used in a lot of the semiconductor

manufacturing process. And that's now a factor for a lot of the semiconductor manufacturing process. And that's now

a factor for a lot of the semiconductor manufacturers to try to deal with these supply constraints

in rising prices. Yeah, say a little bit more about that. I understand helium's used in everything

from chip manufacturing to MRI machines. How is that affecting the tech industry? Yeah, well, you know, on the supply side,

I mean, companies now need to, you know, figure out what additional supply providers that are

actually out there. But probably the bigger impact is really on the pricing side of things,

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