If problems with their graphic chipsets followed by lawsuits from ticked off users isn’t enough to cause Nvidia pain, this will. Their own insurance company is now suing them. Why? Here’s a few reasons from National Union (Nvidia’s insurance company):
“Concurrently with, or prior to, placing National Union on notice of the chip claims, Nvidia has engaged in settlement negotiations with the chip claimants and, on information and belief, has agreed to settlements and/or the material terms of settlements with respect to some or all of the chip claims,” the filing says.
But, complains NUFI: “Nvidia has not permitted National Union to participate in Nvidia’s negotiations of the chip claims or the determination of any settlement or agreements.”
NUFI alleges that Nvidia won’t tell it about the chip claims, and instead has “flooded National Union with technical data” and provided it with details about the GPUs themselves.
It continues that Nvidia has “cloaked its refusals to provide information under the guise of preserving commercial relationships with the chip claimants.” But NUFI says it wants objective, material and non-proprietary information – for example the records of the repairs made.
That translates to something along the lines of this: Nvidia been covering up essential information that NUFI is entitled to receive as Nvidia’s insurer by refusing to disclose even the most basic facts about the company’s GPU chip failures. But it gets better (or worse depending on if you’re Nvidia or not):
“The chip claims arise out of allegedly defectively designed Nvidia chips G86, G86A2, G84, C51, G72, G72M, G73, G72A3, MCP67 and NV42.”
If that’s true, then Nvidia is truly screwed, because that’s a much larger list of potentially defective hardware than Nvidia led people to believe. Some of the chipsets on that list are desktop chipsets. I should point out that this was raised as a possibility some time ago. But now that there’s more then just rumor, I can just see the lawyers prepping the class action lawsuits to serve up to Nvidia.
Oh, what does their insurance company want out of all of this? Simple:
So National Union doesn’t want to pay up. It wants the court to declare it has no duty to indemnify Nvidia because Nvidia has breached the terms of the agreement.
That means that if they win, their insurance company doesn’t have to pay a dime. I suspect that it would like cripple or kill Nvidia too. I guess that Nvidia should have taken my advice from this posting:
Nvidia has to step up to the table regardless of whether this is fact or not and clear this up once and for all. Users of their chipsets have the right to know if the Nvidia chipset they have in their computer is faulty or not. If they are, users of their products have the right to a speedy replacement with a part that works. If Nvidia doesn’t do that and these chips are faulty, then they deserve to be run out of business.
Looks like Nvidia’s days are numbered. It sucks to be them.