When Linux CEO Linus Torvalds warned the world about NVIDIA, called it the ‘worst company we’ve worked with’
Nvidia may be the largest company today by market cap and the darling of tech giants, but that wasn’t always the case. The company, led by Jensen Huang, once faced the ire of Linux CEO Linus Torvalds.
In 2012, the Linux CEO called Nvidia the ‘worst’ company he had ever worked for in a public Q&A session. An old video of the conversation has resurfaced in which Torvalds explains why he thinks the way he does.
“Nvidia has been one of the worst pain points we’ve had in hardware production, and it’s really sad because Nvidia is trying to sell chips to the Android market, trying to sell lots of chips, and Nvidia has been the worst company we’ve ever dealt with,” Linus Torvalds said when a woman asked him about the popular GPU company’s hardware support.
Torvaldos then started using the ‘F word’ for Nvidia, showing the company his middle finger.
Nvidia responds
Nvidia later responded to Linus Torvalds’ complaint, saying that supporting Linus was important to Nvidia.
“Some questions have been raised recently regarding our lack of support for our Optimus laptop technology. [Optimus]In a statement released by PR, there was only support for Windows 7.
“While we understand that some people would prefer that we provide detailed documentation on all of our GPU internals or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, we have made the decision to support Linux on our GPUs using Nvidia common code rather than the Linux common infrastructure,” he added.
He objected to Linux end users receiving support from Nvidia.
“Linux end users benefit from new same-day GPU support, OpenGL release and extension parity between Nvidia Windows and Nvidia Linux support, and OpenGL performance parity between NVIDIA Nvidia and Nvidia Linux,” Nvidia said in its statement.
Nvidia comes a long way
Nvidia has come a long way since 2012. Having signed major deals with itself, Meta had effectively dethroned leading chip maker Intel to become the go-to company for AI-heavy technology giants such as Amazon and Alphabet.
The company achieved many milestones in 2025. Most importantly, it became the first company in world history to reach a market value of $5 trillion, months after reaching $4 trillion.
The company’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, is currently one of the richest billionaires in the world, with a net worth of $165.3 billion. Forbes Real Time Billionaires list.
