Dateline: April 24 2027

During the energy crisis of 2022 analysts were quick to point out that crypto mining, especially bitcoin, consumes as much electricity globally as a small country. Before this it was all about profit, with crypto megaminers relocating to the places with the cheapest electricity to feed their power-hungry rigs. But after the Nord Stream pipeline was cut and Germany turned to coal to keep the lights on, the debate shifted to climate change and basic security of energy to bolster the economy. Bitcoin was the bad guy.

And then came ChatGPT and all the other large language models capable of generating text, images and video from natural language prompts. AI was the new flavour of the month, and chipmakers such as…