The Chinese, who also developed the Loongson MIPS CPU, were looking to order at least ten million graphics processors. The problem is that the GeForce / Quadro driver from NVIDIA is only available for Linux x86 and x86_64 architectures, not MIPS or even ARM (only the Tegra driver is for ARMv7). NVIDIA refused to release the source-code to their high-performance feature-complete cross-platform driver to the Chinese, and it would cost them millions of dollars to port the code-base, so they went to AMD for their GPU order.
The order was at least for ten million GPUs, which given the current low-end parts, would value the order at least 250 to 350 million dollars (USD).
A few days back, Linux founder Linus Torvalds was unhappy with NVidia because of their Linux drivers are binary only. In the talk he called NVIDIA “the single worst company we have ever dealt with” and he said a few other nice words too. 🙂 Hope NVidia open sources it drivers.