What if data centres spike US natural gas demand?
A data-center/electrification demand surge against flat output lifts Henry Hub, but the dominant trade is the AI-capex read-through — gas-fired baseload is the binding constraint on compute, so NVDA and the power-hungry semi complex stay bid. Rhymes with the 2024 'AI needs power' repricing that re-rated IPPs (Vistra, Constellation) and gas names. Forward angle: unlike past gas spikes that were bearish for industry, here the gas bid and the chip bid are the SAME phenomenon — datacenter load.
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 mixed shock. A data-center and electrification surge collides with flat output, spiking US natural gas prices. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Natural gas ▲ · AI capex ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.