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 Nvidia’s $5 Trillion Valuation Redefines What ‘Big’ Tech Means

On Wednesday, just 112 days after becoming the first $4 trillion company, Nvidia Corp. became the first $5 trillion company.

Its worth is more than 8% of the S&P 500, but that’s just the start of it — the AI boost to the markets is built almost entirely off the back of use cases developed on Nvidia chips. The AI strategies of the biggest tech companies, like Microsoft Corp., Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and others, rest on their ability to hurriedly acquire and deploy Nvidia’s hardware in their data centers. While some rivals are trying to develop their own alternatives, notes analyst group Wedbush, “there is only one chip in the world fueling this AI Revolution … and it’s Nvidia.”

Nvidia’s chief executive officer, Jensen Huang, the man they call the Godfather of AI, has spent this week reassuring the world he is not creating a bubble. On his balance sheet, at least, the money is becoming very real: half a trillion dollars expected in revenue over the next five quarters from bookings for its latest chips. “This is quite extraordinary,” Huang said of the moment as he sought to emphasize the diversity of businesses Nvidia is powering. These go well beyond the humble chatbot. Its presentations this week have spanned self-driving cars with Uber Technologies Inc. and Lucid Motors Inc., AI-enhanced cybersecurity with CrowdStrike Holdings Inc.; pharmaceutical research with Eli Lilly & Co., and an expansion into the nascent but promising realm of quantum computing.

The only blip along the way, if it could even be called that, were fears in September 2024 about the production delays of its latest chip, Blackwell, which triggered a sharp 13% selloff. Then there was the worry that China’s DeepSeek would upend US tech sector spending on hardware. It didn’t, and those fears are long forgotten. Huang says the company projects it will sell 20 million of its latest chips, more than five times the volume of the previous generation. This doesn’t take into account the possibility that talks on Thursday between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping of China might pave the way for Nvidia’s most sophisticated chips to be sold to China. The country’s AI companies are eager for better hardware than what its homegrown chipmakers can offer. Current restrictions, which allow only for the sale of older generations of technology, represent the only meek regulatory constraint on Nvidia’s unstoppable rise.

Few are finding reason to be cautious. Concerns about circular financing, in which Nvidia invests in its own customers, do not appear to have altered investment theses. Nor has it dampened Nvidia’s appetite for a deal — the latest being a $1 billion investment in Nokia Oyj, announced this week. If Wall Street wanted to look for potential headwinds to Nvidia’s progress, they would start with its reliance on Taiwan — where most of the latest chips are produced — or in the lingering (though not yet pressing) risk that regulators scrutinize more closely the lock-in between Nvidia’s hardware and its proprietary software for AI development. The overly rash reaction to Blackwell production mishaps last year demonstrated how touchy investors are to any sign of turbulence in Nvidia’s supply chain and logistics.

More broadly, Nvidia needs the downstream rollout of AI — putting it in the hands of consumers and businesses — to start paying off, otherwise the wild capital expenditures might start getting pulled back. Nvidia is relying on others to actually reach the goal of human-level artificial intelligence that will, some say, make all the investment worthwhile.

There was a time when Nvidia was a company responsible for making video games look better. Those carefree days are over. The market cap milestone is a moment for reflection on how one company came to redefine the meaning of “big” in Big Tech at this moment of seismic change. Beyond being just a big number, what is truly unprecedented in the Nvidia story is how integral its success is to the entire global economy: an industrial revolution in which only one company is seen as capable of building the factories. What made Nvidia into a $5 trillion company is also what makes it a potential $5 trillion single point of failure.

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The Outer Worlds 2 doesn't quite reach the stars

The Outer Worlds 2 makes a strong first impression. You belong to the Earth Directorate, a do-gooder organization dedicated to restraining corrupt governments and corporations. After some capital-D Drama, you end up in the Arcadia system, a colony splintered by war between Auntie's Choice (the result of a merger between the first game's two big corporations), the Protectorate (collectivism taken to its worst logical conclusion), and the Order of the Ascendant (like the Catholic church, but with math instead of Jesus). There are also a bunch of rifts tearing holes in space and time, but right now, you really need to reach a relay station for urgent communications purposes. The problem is that it's in the middle of a warzone, and you need to figure out how to get there.

Image: Obsidian Entertainment/Xbox Game Studios via Polygon

Like its predecessor, Outer Worlds 2 is a first-person RPG with an overarching story and dozens of side quests spread out across different planets or zones (big areas with a lot to uncover, but not open-world). The first zone and the process of reaching that comms station are spectacular. You've got some goofy encounters, of course, like one that involves a farmer who has fed too much sugary cereal to their favorite crab. Most lead you to something useful, though — an unexpected new path or some new bit of intel that might open a different path forward.

In one memorable sequence, you can encounter a Protectorate deserter near the bridge who's about to be executed. No quest is tied to it, and the only way to find it is by exploring and listening to the ambient dialogue. If you're fast and careful enough not to let him get killed, you can save him(and then save his deserter lover from getting killed by monsters in their hideout later), but more pertinent to the task at hand is a power line hidden in the grass nearby. If you follow it, you'll find a hidden entrance to the relay station. There's another entrance to the station's sewers tucked away in a cave that you may or may not notice depending on when you pursue a specific companion quest. You can find an easily missable character who's key to saving someone's life 20 hours later. (And there's a stuffed animal who indirectly convinces a squad of soldiers to fight with you, if you're nice enough to save it from a minefield.) This opening chapter is dense and exciting, and it feels like it's brimming with rich storytelling potential that rewards you for your curiosity.

Outer Worlds 2 never lives up to those initial expectations again. The second main area is structured similar to a map in the first Outer Worlds or Avowed — a large region dotted with points of interest and side quests. They're all thematically relevant to the conflict between Auntie's Choice and the Order of the Ascendant, but they're also vignettes isolated from the main story narratively and geographically. Don't expect any environmental clues leading you to new choices like in the first zone.

Image: Obsidian Entertainment/Xbox Game Studios via Polygon

Despite forcing you to make some tough decisions, what you do in this zone's side quests doesn't matter. Like, it really doesn't matter, to the point where whether you enable war crimes or lead a group of refugees to their death results in nothing but a throwaway line or two of dialogue. A game doesn't need to let every quest influence the story in some big, dramatic fashion, but if you're making me choose a side and pretending like my decision matters, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect something more when it's over. When the game's already shown that it can be better, anything less seems like a compromise. You get more of everything like Obsidian promised, but at the cost of depth.

The game's second act tries something similar to the main setup from the first planet, but with noticeably less panache. The concept is a bold one: an interconnected mission that spans two planets and encourages you to seek aid from different factions if you want a smoother path toward your objective. Aside from the repeat setup being a little tiresome, it's also just missing the tension that this kind of scenario should have. It's a "pact with the devil" moment. There should be tough compromise. Your relationship with either faction should matter beyond making them like you more by doing new tasks for them. All of this is absent, because you can just blitz through on your own and clear the objective anyway. The game even goes out of its way to hand you means of doing this, pointing out alternate routes as optional objectives and having allies tell you where to go.

It's a side effect of a broader issue in Outer Worlds 2: the fear of letting you be unhappy with your choices. It frequently goes too far out of its way to make sure not only that there's an alternate route in most cases, but that you know it exists. Locked rooms almost always have multiple entry methods signposted, or nothing worthwhile inside if they don't. If you can't hack or engineer your way through a puzzle, it's okay. There's likely a keycard you can use to bypass the challenge or some essential information on a nearby terminal that gets you what you want. Heck, even one mid-game dilemma that penalizes you for choosing the ethical option immediately gives you the tools to get rid of that penalty, regardless of your skills and traits. Having options is all well and good, but there needs to be some sense of consequence that makes my choices feel worthwhile. Otherwise, why even let me have them?

Image: Obsidian Entertainment/Xbox Game Studios via Polygon

Ironically ,for a choice-driven narrative game, combat is where you end up having the most freedom. Outer Worlds 2 has more weapons compared to the first game and, despite still having limited enemy types, gives you more reason to experiment with different fighting styles. Battles frequently feature a mix of monsters, humans, and robots, so you need a plan before diving in recklessly. I became a walking arsenal of silenced sniper rifles, pistols firing exploding rounds, frost guns, poison revolvers, and a rocket launcher I didn't even remember picking up. A lot of the weapons are just freaking cool, too, including my favorite – a two-handed hammer that you can load shotgun shells into, which is just as chaotic and fun to use as it sounds. Violence might be the primary focus, but stealth is also viable and fantastically rewarding, though you do have to make it the focus of your build in a way that melee and gun options don't require.

Before writing this review, I went back to an earlier save file and pursued one of the optional alliances in the second act to see how distinct the experience was, and the process of reaching your goal is much different. It makes you interact with people and places differently, uses traits and skills in deeper ways, and it's where you'll find some of the juicier bits of storytelling. Which makes it all the more bizarre that these optional paths are presented as if to say, "Hey, there's more game here. Please check it out during another playthrough."

And I will do subsequent playthroughs. For all my complaints about inconsistency, Outer Worlds 2 is very good when it's good. The main story is consistently excellent, even if it's a bit familiar. The evils of corporatism are still very much a focus, but Outer Worlds 2 adopts a perspective that's simultaneously broader and more intimate. Yes, capitalism is bad, and there's a lotta (well-written) jokes about it again, but this time, Obsidian is more concerned with how it affects the way an individual sees themselves and their role in the world. That's true for the other, non-corporate factions as well, and Outer Worlds 2 gradually builds a picture of how human greed and selfishness birth all the evils of society, no matter what that society is or how its people think.

Image: Obsidian Entertainment/Xbox Game Studios via Polygon

It's handled remarkably well at every point, and Obsidian sidesteps a lot of the issues that plagued the first game and other narrative-driven RPGs. The goal is making you think about parallels between the overexaggerated state of affairs in the game and in real life, and since the focus is broader than just "company bad" this time, the humor stays witty and incisive, unlike the first game where it wore thin by the end. The big plot twists are a bit predictable, especially if you have any knowledge of political history, but the general thrust of the story means betrayals and revelations are less important than what they mean for your companions. In the best moments, a climactic event in the story even coincides with a big shift in a companion's personal narrative — a noteworthy achievement in a genre where you usually get a strong story or strong character writing, but not both.

One of the best things Outer Worlds 2 does involves ditching the familiar setup where you have a handful of "milestone moment" conversations with a companion, those pivotal chats where your choices determine how things develop for the rest of the game. Instead, its relationships build over time based on a pattern of interactions, with room for massive screw-ups and moments of redemption as you get to know each other. You still have big moments, of course, like whether to blatantly disrespect a friend's beliefs or leave them for dead. But the more mundane interactions — commenting on one's nature drawings or accidentally calling another a stupid bastard when you thought he wasn't listening — are just as important over time. It makes these relationships feel more fluid and natural, and it's immensely satisfying when you end up in a dramatic scenario where the build-up of your actions is the reason you can reach a positive (or terrible) outcome.

And yet Outer Worlds 2's reactivity is just as spotty with companions as it is with side quests. The tension of balancing competing convictions, which the game makes a big point of talking about as you start onboarding more allies, is mostly window dressing. Unless you routinely murder members of a faction that one of your companions belongs to, they don't much care what you do or who you do it with. At one point, I was even walking around with the skull of one faction's founder in my pocket, and the companion from that faction — who saw me loot her tomb and steal her son's clothes from a museum exhibit — was perfectly fine with it. There's no tension amongst companions, either. They'd kill each other on sight under normal circumstances, but once they join up, they just occasionally make passive-aggressive comments about the other person's background.

The Outer Worlds 2 is defined by its whiplash, alternating between deeply rewarding storytelling and outcomes that feel rushed and stilted. I largely enjoyed the time I spent (mostly) making Arcadia a better place; it’s just disappointing to see such strong potential in the opening hours that doesn't show up again. There's a middle ground between the first game's brevity and the sequel's overly ambitious nature, and I hope Obsidian gets the chance to find it in a third game.

The Outer Worlds 2 is available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Windows PC on Oct. 24 for those who purchase the premium edition and Oct. 29 for everyone else. This game was reviewed on Windows PC using a prerelease download code provided by the Microsoft.