What if Intel exits leading-edge chipmaking and goes fabless?
Intel quitting sub-2nm and going fabless concentrates all leading-edge production at TSMC — paradoxically a TSMC pricing-power positive long-term, but the tape reads the supply-fragility/AI-capex doubt and marks the complex down near-term. Rhymes with the AMD-spins-off-GlobalFoundries era when ceding leading-edge reshaped the foundry map. Forward angle: single-source leading edge raises Taiwan-concentration tail risk — bullish TSMC margins, bearish the system's geopolitical resilience.
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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 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. Intel abandons sub-2nm manufacturing and goes fabless, ceding leading-edge production entirely to TSMC. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Semiconductor supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.