What if chipmakers turn out to be financing their own customers?
Vendor-financing disclosure (chipmakers funding their own GPU buyers) is a revenue-recognition scare — it implies reported AI demand is partly circular, hitting Nvidia hardest and widening HY credit. Rhymes with telecom vendor-financing in 2000-01 (Lucent/Nortel funding carriers) that unwound violently when demand proved hollow. Skeptic's note: the channel is real this cycle, so the de-rating is on multiples, not solvency — watch backlog cancellations as the confirming tell.
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. Disclosure that chipmakers funded their own customers' GPU buys triggers an AI revenue-recognition selloff. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — AI capex ▼ · Credit spreads ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.