What if a hyperscaler slashes its AI capex guidance by 30%?
A 30% hyperscaler capex cut is the cleanest bear case: it directly removes order flow from Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron HBM, and bleeds into high-beta crypto via risk appetite. Closest analogue is the Jan-2025 DeepSeek shock, which took Nvidia down ~17% in a session on a demand-efficiency scare. Forward angle: with one hyperscaler guiding down, watch whether peers reaffirm — a single cut historically gets bought unless a second 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 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. A megacap cuts AI capex guidance 30%, cascading through Nvidia, memory, power and data-center supply chains. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — AI capex ▼ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.