What if a Chinese lab matches a US flagship using only domestic chips?
A Chinese frontier model trained end-to-end on domestic HBM and Ascend logic reaching US parity guts the export-control thesis: Nvidia and US semis fall on lost China TAM, while China internet and copper catch a bid on the growth signal. Rhymes with DeepSeek Jan-2025 but worse — it proves hardware independence, not just algorithmic efficiency. Transmission: validates Huawei's stack and shifts Global-South AI demand toward Chinese silicon. Forward angle: this is the controls' failure-mode scenario.
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. A Chinese lab trains a frontier model end-to-end on domestic HBM and Ascend logic, matching a US flagship benchmark-for-benchmark. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — AI capex ▼ · China growth ▲ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.