By Victor Tangermann
Publication Date: 2025-11-18 16:20:00
The stock market has taken another beating this week, continuing a weeks-long tech selloff that ignited over fears of a growing AI bubble.
The S&P 500 is down almost 3.5 percent over the last five days alone. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has slid more than a full percent on Tuesday alone.
Looming over it all is AI chipmaker Nvidia’s Wednesday earnings call — results that could send ripples through rattled markets, for good or ill.
Many AI companies have a problem, in the form of an astronomical gap between sky-high valuations and relatively meager revenues. In a sense, Nvidia is more grounded: it builds the physical chips that those companies use to power their AI models, meaning that if there’s an AI gold rush, it’s selling shovels.
That’s worked out well for Nvidia, which hit an unprecedented $5 trillion valuation last month. But it also means that if Nvidia is in trouble, the rest of the AI industry is also in deep trouble — and, as if those stakes weren’t high enough, the untold tens of billions of dollars being poured into data center buildouts are increasingly propping up the remainder of the US economy, meaning that if Nvidia starts to falter, virtually everyone else could be negatively affected.
Essentially, many of the world’s most powerful business leaders are going all-in on AI — while critics say it’s a house of cards that could come down if one load-bearing…
