What if the US cuts off chip-design software to China?
Revoking Synopsys/Cadence EDA access is a kill-switch on Chinese fabless design - nothing new gets taped out - making this one of the harder-hitting controls, with Cadence/Synopsys losing ~12-16% China revenue and TSMC pressured on China order loss. Rhymes with the 2022 EDA-for-GAAFET ban and Huawei's 2019 entity-listing design freeze. China is the cut-off customer; the forward angle is software is instantly enforceable (no smuggling around it), so the choke is cleaner and faster than hardware embargoes.
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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. US revokes chip-design software licenses to China; Synopsys and Cadence access vanishes, stalling Chinese fabless firms. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — China growth ▼ · Semiconductor supply risk ▲ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.