What if a chip-grade neon gas shortage halts lithography?
Loss of Ukrainian/Russian neon, krypton and xenon hits lithography gases, so the clean chain is TSMC and fabless leaders (Nvidia) down on a fab-input chokepoint, with ASML dragged on the litho read. Direct analogue is the 2022 invasion neon scare, which spiked spot neon multi-fold but fabs had buffered inventory and qualified new sources. Ukraine historically supplied ~half of semiconductor-grade neon; fabs since diversified to US/Korea/China gas. Forward angle: post-2022 inventory builds and alternative suppliers make this far less acute than the cascade implies — fade the semis dip.
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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 0–6 months 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-off shock. Loss of Ukrainian and Russian neon, krypton, and xenon halts semiconductor lithography worldwide. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Semiconductor supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.