What if the AI capital spending boom finally pays off in productivity?
A confirmed productivity surge validates the capex, flipping the buildout from 'spend' to 'payoff': NVDA/Broadcom/Micron re-rate higher on durable demand, semis and crypto beta ride risk-on, VIX compresses. The template is May-2023, when Nvidia's guidance blowout ignited the entire AI-capex wave and lifted the complex for months. Forward angle: a macro (TFP) confirmation broadens the trade beyond chips into software and power/grid names — the laggards, not NVDA, offer the fresher beta.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-on shock. Macro data confirms an AI-driven productivity surge, lifting growth estimates and re-rating the buildout. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — AI capex ▲ · Growth surprise ▲ · Risk appetite ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.