What if a sovereign AI arms race redirects national budgets to chips?
A sovereign compute arms race is a structural capex tailwind: NVDA, AVGO and Micron (HBM) lead as budgets reallocate toward chips and power, lifting the whole semi complex modestly. Rhymes with the 2022 CHIPS Act and the post-May-2023 NVDA-guidance capex wave, both of which durably re-rated AI silicon. The forward kicker is power: grid/transformer and nuclear bottlenecks become the binding constraint, so the second-order trade is electrical equipment and uranium, not just GPUs.
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 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. A national AI/compute arms race reallocates major budgets toward chips and power. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — AI capex ▲ · Semiconductor supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.