My crystal ball is whispering that today, after the US closing bell, Nvidia will probably dump another set of jaw-dropping numbers on the table — perhaps a few more billions in sales revenue than the ~$55 billion expected by analysts (which would already be a nearly 60% growth compared to the same time last year) and a gross margin of ideally more than 73%.

The company will likely give another stellar guidance and remind everyone that China — once their VIP client — doesn’t even matter in their forecast as much as it did before. CEO Jensen Huang wants investors to assume that the Chinese revenue will be zero. Anything on top of that would be the cherry on top.

But what my crystal ball doesn’t tell is how investors will react. Everyone is now focused on the worries that the huge spending its too high compared to revenue potential, and on the rising anxiety around the circularity of AI deals.

Another one just dropped yesterday between Nvidia, Microsoft and Anthropic. The former two will invest a combined $15bn into Anthropic, and the latter will buy computing power from Microsoft’s Azure that – in turn - will be powered by Nvidia chips.

Told like this, the whole AI thing does sound like nothing more than a handful of companies sending each other billions of dollars without hints of money flowing inside the circle from outside. But it’s like Mc Donalds buying beef and tomatoes for its burgers. It must do it. Eventually someone will buy the burger. But when, and how much burger is to be seen.

Add to that the fact that Japanese yields are now at levels where Japanese investors prefer bringing their money back to Japan. The 10-year Japanese government bond yield surpassed levels where borrowing yen and placing it in US Treasuries makes no money— after taking FX hedging costs into account.

As a result, the Japanese pensions funds are reportedly pulling $1.1 trillion out of the US Treasuries right now – meaning that one of the biggest Treasury buyers is turning into a net seller.

In plain English, the Japs may be pulling the rug from under the US Treasury market – that also affects riskier investments like tech, EM stocks and crypto. So maybe we will simply blame the Japanese if the Bank of Japan  BoJ) dares hiking rates come December... and that Santa remains stuck somewhere where there’s still snow this Xmas.

But on a more optimistic note, I don’t think the BoJ will gather enough courage to move rates higher. Provided the stress in JGBs, the BoJ Team certainly sees that a rate hike could trigger a budget-crisis scenario akin to what we saw with Liz Truss in the UK. And a severe earthquake in the JGB markets would then trigger a tsunami across global financial markets.

So, if markets don’t turn risk-on after Jensen Huang pushes the ‘on’ button tonight, it may be time for a 10-20% correction. And of course, some love adding fuel to the fire saying that current Big Tech valuations are based on a US 10-year yield of around 2% — continuously — and so if someone comes out and says ‘the emperor is naked’ and the new 10-year benchmark is say nearer 3.5%, valuations could take a 30-40% hit.

It’s simple math: many favourite tech stocks trade 25-35 times their earnings. A readjustment of the discount rate could compress them to 18-22 times. So, either your price falls 30-40% or earnings grow strong enough to counteract the higher discount rate. But it’s not that simple.

A month ago — when AI deals were flying in the air — your average tech investor would rather see earnings grow fast enough to neutralise the impact of higher US yields. Today, all they worry about is rising debt. And debt smells worse when borrowing costs mount…

The mounting anxiety is pushing credit default spreads to levels some compare to banks just before the sub-prime crisis — with CoreWeave, Tesla, Inc. and Oracle Corporation occupying the top positions in the list of companies most expensive to hedge against default in the next half-decade.

But it’s crazy we went from “AI is everything we always dreamed of” to “this is a worthless bubble” and “screw you OpenAI.” But I can tell you: when an outage at Cloudflare disrupted OpenAI yesterday, and my ChatGPT gave a message saying that I should ‘unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed,’ I didn’t know where to go, what to do, who to ask — a small reminder that when ChatGPT is now around, it doesn’t feel the same.

So, reason tells me there should be a midway between these two extremes — relentless rally and that 30-40% meltdown. Nvidia and other chip companies will certainly continue to sell their chips and grow their fortune; tech companies will continue to develop their AI models, rent data-centres and sell their products to companies outside the tech buddies— say healthcare, banks, hairdressers, tax-offices, McDonalds and anything you could think of. Some will fail. Others will survive. And those who survive will eventually see revenue flow in. Someone will buy the burger.

As for spending, it will level out when the first booming phase is over. Maybe there will be a financial crisis before we get to the safer side of the bridge, but eventually the world will survive. If not, robots will come to the rescue. And while this happens, central banks will be there to temper any potential crisis and print money.

Stay well. Think positive — and maybe keep an eye on the Federal Reserve minutes — just in case!