The slump on Wall Street has rippled across to the London stock market too. The FTSE 100 share index has closed for the night, down 46 points or 0.4% at 10,782 points. Earlier this morning the ‘Footsie’ had been up over 100 points. Susannah Streeter, chief investment strategist at Wealth Club, says: ‘Fresh panic over the AI trade has hit Wall Street hard, with a steep sell-off on the Nasdaq, and the S&P 500 sending shockwaves rippling to other markets. Fears that the vast sums poured into AI infrastructure may not deliver the returns investors have been banking on are now colliding with the prospect of a sharp slowdown in data centre construction. Chip stocks have been the hardest hit with AMD down 13%, Nvidia falling around 7% and Intel another 5.5%. The contagion is spreading - the FTSE 100, which had been on the front foot and is far less exposed to big tech, has now erased its earlier gains and turned negative. Even a tech-lite index with defensive appeal hasn’t been able to shrug