What if a Taiwan earthquake shut down TSMC's most advanced fabs?
A Hsinchu-area quake that knocks out TSMC leading-edge lines is a genuine supply shock, not a demand scare: fabless names (Nvidia, AMD) cannot re-source 3nm anywhere, so the squeeze hits volumes and pricing for quarters, with TSMC itself the cleanest short on the impact. Closest real rhyme is the 1999 Chi-Chi quake (and the Feb-2024 Hualien tremor), which dented TSMC output briefly but recovered fast. Forward angle: today's near-zero leading-edge redundancy means a multi-week halt prices far worse than 1999.
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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. A major Taiwan earthquake halts TSMC's leading-edge fabs, choking advanced chips. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Semiconductor supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.