What if Washington bars allied HBM sales to Chinese-linked AI clusters?
Extending HBM curbs to bar Korean/Japanese sales into any China-serving cluster is a hard trade-tension shock: TSMC and the semi complex crater, the yuan weakens, and Alibaba bears China-megacap risk. Direct analogue is the Apr-2025 US-China tariff peak and the Oct-2022 export-control rollout that gapped semis lower. Transmission: Korea/Japan are the HBM oligopoly, so the curb hits allied exporters (SK Hynix, Samsung) as much as China's clusters — forward risk is Chinese retaliation via rare-earth/gallium controls.
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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 6–18 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. Washington forces Korea and Japan to bar HBM sales into any third-country AI cluster serving Chinese end-users. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Semiconductor supply risk ▲ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.