I have to think that nvidia isn’t dumb enough to look around at their competitor’s linux support, and look at the reliance on linux for compute in datacenters, and look at their pile of fancy new AI chips that they’re going to try to sell to data centers, and think to themselves, “ahh, I know the best move, poach the best nvidia linux dev in the world so that ~2% of gamers are forced to use our proprietary driver!”
My guess is they’re doing this to make money on AI, they couldn’t care less about linux gaming. If we get an open source driver out of the deal, I won’t complain, but I bet the consumer GPU driver has little to do with why they hired him.