NVIDIA, the world’s most valuable company with a $4.3 trillion market capitalization, adopted its first corporate social responsibility strategy almost 20 years ago. From the start, its agenda centered largely on human rights, supply chain management and philanthropic issues.
Its priorities shifted in August 2023, when the company hired the assistant general counsel from hard drive maker Western Digital, Josh Parker, to revamp its sustainability strategy. Two years later, the company has stepped up its emissions reduction initiatives with two new commitments, validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) and disclosed in June.
But the biggest priority for NVIDIA’s sustainability team is advocating and steering continuous improvements in the energy efficiency of its graphics processors, a crucial component of the construction boom in data centers meant to power artificial intelligence.
“We cannot unlock the next level of performance for AI if we don’t deliver really dramatic improvements in energy efficiency,” Parker said. “It becomes a practical necessity to help us advance AI. It also is exactly what our customers want, because it lowers their total cost of ownership, of course, and also makes it easier just to build data centers in an energy supply-constrained environment.”
NVIDIA’s biggest buyers — including cloud companies Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft — desperately need to speed up AI processing times to have any hope of reaching their emissions reduction pledges. A single “AI factory” can use 100 to 200 megawatts of power annually — that’s on par with a traditional manufacturing facility, as NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang notes in the company’s 2025 sustainability report.
“We work very closely with our customers on decarbonization,” Parker said.
NVIDIA’s latest technology architecture, Blackwell, is 25 times more energy-efficient than its predecessor and 50 times more efficient than competitive offerings, according to the company. Translation: 40 trillion watt-hours of electricity can be saved annually by using technology accelerated with its graphics processors, NVIDIA estimates.
The company will use a new SBTI-validated emissions intensity pledge to measure ongoing progress: the goal is to reduce the emissions intensity from use of its products by 75 percent per PetaFLOP, or one quadrillion floating-point operations per second.
“It’s the operation of our products that is, by far, the biggest impact from an emissions perspective,” Parker said. “So whatever we can do to make our products more energy efficient is the most impactful thing we can do.”
Deeper focus: supplier emissions
The emissions associated with NVIDIA’s production activities, however, are also skyrocketing. The company’s greenhouse gas inventory doubled from 2023 to 2025, to 6.9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, according to its 2025 sustainability report.
NVIDIA’s reduction targets call for a 50 percent cut for operations (Scope 1) and electricity consumption (Scope 2) by 2030, which account for less than 1 percent of the total. The company is “fabless,” meaning it relies on partners to manufacture its chips. The biggest single portion of NVIDIA’s reported footprint is purchased goods and services at about 6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equipment in FY25.