This has been an exciting week for Nvidia. Earlier Linus Torvalds fingered them for not open sourcing their drivers and making it hard for the Linux community to work with them. Now Nvidia's arrogance has cost them a huge Chinese order. They seemed to have lost the entire Chinese market to competitor AMD which does have open source drivers for their GPU.

One of the leading Chinese companies were looking for GPUs to power their pilot school PC project. These PCs were running Linux on their own MIPS CPU. The company approached Nvidia to supply GeForce/Quardro  GPUs for their project. Unfortunately, the GeForce/Quardro drivers are available only for x86 based architectures. It's not available for MIPS or even ARM. Nvidia's officials told Chinese that it would cost them millions of dollars to port the code-base.

Chinese did not want to spend this much money on just porting the code-base. Since Nvidia never releases the source code of their drivers, the Chinese went to AMD which has open source drivers.

This is more than just one deal as now Chinese will be dealing with AMD for the future purchases. That was one of the reasons why IBM sold its PC unit to Chinese Lenovo instead of some US company. That sale brought IBM closer to Chinese officials and when Chinese look for procurement IBM is their first choice.

With its arrogance Nvidia has just blown away all the potentials it had to penetrate the huge Chinese market. The question is, will Nvidia change its stance on open sourcing its drivers of continue to lose the market to AMD.