India, March 6 -- It hurts when petrol prices climb or cooking gas gets scarce. But ever wondered what powers the apps on your phone? The servers that store your photos? Or the AI now rewriting the rules of our world?

Last week, something broke in the Gulf. Qatar's massive Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) plants fell silent under force majeure. This is a legal term for an unforeseen catastrophe. That is also when the world's most precise machines, semiconductor fabrication plants, felt the first tremors.

To understand why, we must look past the code and into the "hidden plumbing" of the physical world. Most of us associate helium with birthday balloons. But it is the world's ultimate coolant. In the "fabs" where chips are born, machines etch...