The conjugate gradient (CG) method is one of the most efficient algorithms for solving a linear system of equations. In addition to being used as a linear equation solver, it can be applied to a least-squares problem. When the CG method is applied to large-scale three-dimensional inversion of magnetotelluric data, two approaches have been pursued; one is the linear CG inversion in which each step of the Gauss-Newton iteration is incompletely solved using a truncated CG technique, and the other is referred to as the nonlinear CG inversion in which CG is directly applied to the minimization of objective functional for a nonlinear inverse problem. In each procedure we only need to compute the effect of the sensitivity matrix or its transpose multiplying an arbitrary vector, significantly reducing the computational requirements needed to do large-scale inversion.