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The past month has been a nail-biter for tech companies and their investors. On Thursday, 5 November, the Nasdaq 100 (an index composed largely of AI-focused US tech stocks) fell more than six per cent, losing more than $2.3 trillion in market value in a single day. Markets have since staged something of a recovery, but what has worried investors about the recent turbulence is that stocks unrelated to AI also fell; this is a whiff of wider contagion, the makings of a crash that has been predicted, in some quarters, for more than two years .

Not every AI company has recovered, however; Nvidia, the most significant manufacturer of the GPUs used in AI datacentres, has been engulfed by a scandal that has wiped more than $300 billion from its market value. It was no surprise that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has been wearing the overpriced leather jackets of a recently divorced dad since the early 2010s, was having an extramarital affair.…