What if China cracked sub-5nm chips on its own?
An SMIC sub-5nm surprise is bearish TSMC/ASML on lost monopoly rents and bullish Chinese tech sovereignty, but the near-term market read is risk-off for the whole complex as the US lead — the entire export-control thesis — erodes. No clean historical match; the closest is the 2023 SMIC 7nm Kirin reveal that spooked the equipment chain briefly. Skeptic's note: yield and EUV-less scaling cap real volumes, so treat the first selloff in ASML as an overshoot to fade unless throughput data confirms.
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 mixed shock. China (SMIC) achieves a domestic sub-5nm chip breakthrough, eroding the US lead. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Semiconductor supply risk ▲ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.