Cascade
Simulate disruptions through 11,858 supplier–customer relationships among 4,216 organizations
5 corrections · latest Sep 23, 2026
- Sep 23, 2026 · Cascade: the downstream plate states connections, not how far a failure reaches
- Sep 23, 2026 · Cascade: relationships last disclosed five or more years before the latest filing wave no longer propagate
- Sep 23, 2026 · Cascade: partnerships no longer propagate as supply
- Sep 7, 2026 · Stargate UAE chip inventory withheld
- Sep 5, 2026 · Unsupported supply-chain values withheld
The cascade engine
Downstream connections. Organizations ranked by the number of others connected downstream within 3 recorded supplier–customer links, each counted once. The count records relationships and says nothing about volume, share or substitutes.
This count uses the publicly inspectable relationships. The simulation also uses licensed relationships, weights each by the evidence for it and stops at an impact cutoff, so its results are not read off this curve.
Relationships last disclosed five or more years before the latest filing wave are not drawn; an undated relationship can still name a company since acquired or dissolved.
Across this graph, an organization has an average of 1.6 downstream organizations within one link, 5 within two, and 11 within three. Within three links, none connects to 100 others downstream (the most connected, to 98); 176 have none recorded. These counts do not account for the strength of a dependency or the availability of substitutes. How propagation is derived
Graph coverage
- 11,858
- relationships used in simulations across 4,216 organizations. Of these, 1,924 come from a licensed layer limited to relationships between organizations already in Scrutica's records.
- 999
- publicly inspectable relationships across 591 organizations, drawn in the graph and used to calculate the connections curve. Additional licensed relationships are included in simulations but cannot be redistributed. The drawn graph’s JSON lists 2,648 relationships across 1,365 organizations: these 999, 627 partnerships and 1,022 relationships whose latest disclosure covers a fiscal period ending on or before 2019-12-31. Only the 999 are drawn, and only they propagate: a partnership moves nothing from supplier to customer, and a relationship with no disclosure in the five years to the latest filing wave is not evidence of a present dependency.
- 20,798
- source records, including 8,940 the simulation does not propagate along: another source’s record of the same relationship, an unnamed counterparty aggregate, a partnership, or a relationship last disclosed five or more years before the latest filing wave.
The pre-built scenarios 20 seeds
| Scenario | Category | Seed nodes | Severity | Tier | Decay |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TSMC Taiwan Disruption | Natural disaster | TSMC | 1.00 | T4 | 0.90 |
| ASML Export Halt | Export control | ASML | 1.00 | T4 | 0.95 |
| US–China Full Decouple: Revenue Impact | Geopolitical | NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm Inc | 0.15 | T4 | 0.70 |
| US–China Full Decouple: Access Denial | Geopolitical | SMIC, Huawei Technologies, Baidu, ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent Holdings Ltd. | 0.55 | T4 | 0.80 |
| CoWoS Advanced Packaging Bottleneck | Supply bottleneck | TSMC | 0.40 | T4 | 0.70 |
| SK Hynix HBM Disruption | Supply bottleneck | SK Hynix | 0.60 | T4 | 0.80 |
| EDA Export Restriction | Export control | Synopsys, Cadence | 0.90 | T4 | 0.80 |
| Chiplet Assembly Disruption | Supply bottleneck | TSMC, Synopsys, Cadence | 0.80 | T4 | 0.75 |
| Qatar helium disruption (March 2026) | Supply bottleneck | Samsung, SK Hynix, TSMC | 0.65 | T4 | 0.75 |
| InP/EML Laser Shortage | Supply bottleneck | Coherent, Lumentum Holdings | 0.85 | T4 | 0.80 |
| ABF build-up film supply (Ajinomoto) | Supply bottleneck | Ajinomoto Co., Inc. | 0.90 | T4 | 0.95 |
| Gallium/germanium controls return (after 27 Nov 2026) | Geopolitical | Coherent, Skyworks Solutions, Qorvo, Wolfspeed, Infineon Technologies | 0.70 | T4 | 0.65 |
| CoWoS 2026 Allocation Constraint | Supply bottleneck | TSMC | 0.85 | T4 | 0.85 |
| Japan Semiconductor-Input Seismic Shock (Korea coupling) | Natural disaster | Shin-Etsu, SUMCO, Tokyo Electron, Advantest, Disco, Lasertec, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo, Resonac Holdings, Kioxia | 0.70 | T4 | 0.82 |
| Allied Coordination: TSMC Advanced Node Restriction | Policy intervention | TSMC | 1.00 | T4 | 0.90 |
| EDA License Restriction: China Entity List Expansion | Policy intervention | Synopsys, Cadence | 0.95 | T4 | 0.80 |
| Netherlands DUV Export Restriction to China | Policy intervention | ASML | 0.70 | T4 | 0.85 |
| China Critical Minerals Retaliatory Restriction | Policy intervention | Coherent, Skyworks Solutions, Qorvo, Wolfspeed, Infineon Technologies | 0.70 | T4 | 0.65 |
| Multilateral Cloud Compute Access Restriction | Policy intervention | Amazon.com, Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Alphabet, Oracle Corporation | 0.80 | T4 | 0.75 |
| Netherlands EUV Restriction: Allied Countries Only | Policy intervention | ASML | 1.00 | T4 | 0.95 |
Related research
Epoch’s analysis of the CoWoS packaging and HBM memory chokepoint documents the concentration at both ends of the supply relationship: NVIDIA, Google, AMD and Amazon on the demand side; TSMC, SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron on the supply side. Relationships of that kind are the edges the simulator above propagates over.