What if a flagship data-center nuclear power deal collapses?
A flagship nuclear PPA collapse exposes AI's unbacked power assumptions, pressuring Nvidia and capex on stranded-buildout risk plus high-beta crypto. Loosely rhymes with the 2010s nuclear-project cancellations (VC Summer) where power-deal failures stranded billions. Forward angle: power, not chips, is the real 2026+ AI bottleneck — a single PPA failure is a sentiment hit, but the structural read is that capex without firm electricity is optionality the market is mispricing as certainty.
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 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. A flagship data-center nuclear power deal collapses, exposing AI's unbacked electricity assumptions. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — AI capex ▼ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.