Nvidia is a massive and storied company. It may make some of the best graphics cards you can buy, but Team Green has its hands in a lot of different businesses, and it's leveraged some shady tactics in those businesses in the past.

This isn't to pick on Nvidia specifically -- most companies at this scale have done some underhanded things -- but it's good to look back at some of the controversies Nvidia has found itself wrapped up in, and how customers and regulatory agencies have responded.

7 Nvidia's attempted acquisition of Arm

Inside baseball, but a controversy nonetheless

Nvidia has acquired dozens of smaller companies over the years, and invested heavily in even more, but its proposed $40 billion acquisition of Arm set off alarm bells. And for good reason. Nvidia announced its plan to acquire Arm in 2020 as the pandemic was getting under way, and at the time, the company still lived in relative obscurity compared to the mainstream success it has since seen. It was one of the largest mergers ever, and the largest the semiconductor industry had ever seen.

Naturally, regulatory agencies around the world took note and spawned investigations. Two years on, with the deal pending, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Nvidia, blocking and ultimately terminating the acquisition. In addition to vertical integration concerns, the lawsuit alleged that the acquisition would give Nvidia access to sensitive information about its competitors, which also do business with Arm.

In hindsight, the FTC's block was a good move. No one at the time could've predicted the release of ChatGPT and Nvidia's meteoric rise to become one of the wealthiest companies in the world. Even without Arm, Nvidia dominates somewhere around 90% of the AI market and 80% of the consumer GPU market. Could you imagine where those numbers would be with Arm?

6 Nvidia scraping videos to train AI

Oh no, the massive corporation hid the truth

Where do these AI companies get all the data to train their models? You and I both know, but Nvidia has maintained the position that it doesn't use copyrighted materials to train its models, as have other companies, like OpenAI. The reality of AI training data is messy, with half-baked datasets put together years ago being used to train models that go on to serve as the foundation for other models. But Nvidia was reportedly caught redhanded not only using copyrighted data to train an AI model, but doing so maliciously and intentionally.

In an explosive report from 404 Media, the outlet revealed internal communications at Nvidia that showed a directive to scrape "a human lifetime" worth of videos from platforms like YouTube and Netflix. And not just that much video in totality. The communications show Nvidia was doing this every day. "We are finalizing the v1 data pipeline and securing the necessary computing resources to build a video data factory that can yield a human lifetime visual experience worth of training data per day," read an internal Nvidia email, according to 404 Media.

The project would go on to become Nvidia Cosmos, which is a set of world foundation models meant to train robots and autonomous vehicles. Nvidia has, of course, denied the report and said it's upheld copyright law. But it's not a good look when leaked internal communications say what we've all been thinking.

5 The RTX 4080 12GB

We barely knew ye

Nvidia's last-gen Ada Lovelace GPUs stirred up a ruckus when they were originally announced, and that largely came down to the RTX 4080. When the cards were first revealed, Nvidia said it would be releasing the RTX 4080 in two variants -- one with 12GB of VRAM and another with 16GB. That's not unheard of in the world of GPUs. AMD had 4GB and 8GB versions of the RX 480, for example, and Nvidia released 10GB and 12GB variants of the RTX 3080. But gamers were up in arms about the RTX 4080 12GB, which forced Nvidia to "unlaunch" the card shortly after it was announced.

PC gamers are a fickle bunch, but the backlash over the RTX 4080 was justified. Despite the 16GB and 12GB models carrying the same name, they were radically different GPUs. I mean, literally, they used different GPUs. The 16GB version was built on the AD103 GPU while the 12GB version used AD104. The RTX 4080 12GB had less VRAM, sure, but more importantly, it had a 21% reduction in core count. Those are awfully different specs for two GPUs carrying the RTX 4080 name.

It was a clear and rather brazen attempt at deception, luring unsuspecting buyers into purchasing a card that was in an entirely different class of performance. Nvidia recognized that and pulled the plug on the RTX 4080 12GB, resurfacing it shortly after as the RTX 4070 Ti with identical specs but a price that was $100 lower.

4 Nvidia's cryptomining revenue

I guess there are just a lot more PC gamers suddenly

Between 2016 and 2018, there was a surge of interest in cryptocurrency. Any PC gamer who lived through that time knows that fact all too well, as bootstrapping cryptominers cleared the shelves of GPUs to try and get in on the action. Nvidia (and AMD, for what it's worth) tried to downplay the impact of cryptominers on its GPU sales. In fact, it downplayed the impact so much that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Comission (SEC) took legal action against Nvidia a few years later.

In 2018, Nvidia reported large growth in its gaming business, which is the segment its desktop GPU sales fall under. You would assume this was due to an increased demand in cryptocurrency mining, and the SEC alleged that Nvidia had information that "this increase in gaming sales was driven in significant part by cryptomining." Nvidia didn't disclose that, though, which it was required to do.

Nvidia never admitted to hiding the impact of cryptomining on its GPU sales, but it agreed to pay the SEC a $5.5 million fine in 2022. The SEC said the improper disclosures misled investors and analysts, with Nvidia's financial reports suggesting the increased revenue was solely due to gaming sales, not highly volatile cryptomining.

3 The GTX 970's VRAM capacity

4GB equals 3.5GB + 0.5GB

In September 2014, Nvidia released its GTX 970. It was a popular card, and it received excellent reviews due to its $329 price tag and performance that was in shocking proximity to the $549 GTX 980. However, users quickly found an issue. When using the 4GB graphics card, games would almost never go above 3.5GB. And, when they did, there was a massive performance hit, with an onslaught of stuttering in tow.

That wasn't a mistake. Nvidia later revealed that there were two partitions on the GTX 970. The first 3.5GB was the "fast" memory, while the remaining 0.5GB was significantly slower. Each memory module was connected to a memory controller and a chunk of L2 cache, short of the last 0.5GB module, which didn't have any cache. It was somewhere around 1/7th the speed, and it largely served as a spillover pool when games pushed above 3.5GB. And when that happened, you'd encounter major stutters without the L2 cache helping the memory move as fast as possible.

This situation led to 15 different class-action lawsuits, which were eventually grouped together into one big suit. Nvidia settled and agreed to pay GTX 970 owners $30 for the misleading specifications. The capacity was one issue, but moreover, Nvidia represented the memory subsystem of the GTX 970 as identical to the GTX 980, which wasn't the case at all.

2 Nvidia blocking reviewers

Things aren't supposed to work that way

There's something important you need to understand about product reviews. It's free marketing. It doesn't really matter what the conclusion of the review is; the reviewer is informing their audience, who trusts them, about their experience with a product. That's why companies like Nvidia send products out for review. This unwritten rule is important, as it ensures that companies like Nvidia can't just send products out to people they know will be positive. That doesn't help customers, it doesn't help reviewers, and it reduces trust in the company's product. So, there was an understandable uproar when popular YouTube channel HardwareUnboxed shared that Nvidia would no longer send it products for review.

HardwareUnboxed shared this publicly, viewers reacted negatively, and Nvidia ultimately backpedaled while the wider YouTube tech community jumped on the hate train. Perhaps the biggest channel that covers Nvidia's products, Linus Tech Tips, even briefly showed a script for an unpublished video where it suggested Nvidia tried to pressure the channel's sponsors after it supported HardwareUnboxed.

The whole fiasco was clearly meant to be handled behind closed doors without any interaction from the wider PC enthusiast community, but that plan backfired. Thankfully, we haven't heard about a similar situation since.

1 The Nvidia GeForce Partner Program

Anti-competitive, anti-consumer programs aren't a good look

There's nothing else that could take the top slot here. Nvidia's GeForce Partner Program was a mess that stirred up so much controversy that it has its own Wikipedia page. The GeForce Partner Program, or GPP, was introduced in March 2018. It was a marketing program for Nvidia's board partners, which is something we see all the time with PC hardware, from bundled game codes to massive flagships like the recent ROG Astral design. The problem with GPP is that it required a "gaming brand exclusively aligned with GeForce," according to a report published by HardOCP a week after the program was introduced. In other words, board partners couldn't make designs for Nvidia's competitors.

Two months later, Nvidia killed the program, probably due to the "likely illegal" terms of the program that HardOCP uncovered. Those terms included things like "priority allocation" for GPP members, as well as price reductions and marketing funds. It would essentially allow Nvidia to control the brands that succeeded or failed based on who bent the knee. As if community backlash wasn't enough, reports suggested that regulatory agencies like the FTC were going to get involved.

The GeForce Partner Program was gone before it ever really got underway, and that's probably a good thing. Nvidia maintained that it didn't want to "battle misinformation" surrounding the program, and that's why it shuttered the GPP. But given the reporting that came out around the time, that's a tough narrative to believe.

Push and pull

Although Nvidia has found itself in legal trouble in the past, a lot of companies at this scale have. The more important takeaway is how Nvidia has responded to backlash. In situations like the RTX 4080 12GB, the GPP, and Nvidia blocking access to popular reviewers, pushback from the PC gaming community ultimately pushed Nvidia to reverse course. That's a good thing. Unchecked, any company could get away with all sorts of underhanded things.

And in situations where things are truly bad, from the GPP to the GTX 970, hopefully there's some sort of resolution. That's certainly what's happened in the past.