NVIDIA, the world’s most valuable company by market capitalisation, has been using greenwashing tricks to misleadingly mask its staggering emissions impacts, finds a new analysis.
The briefing, written by analyst and lead author Ketan Joshi and a consortium of civil society groups, including Greenpeace International, Beyond Fossil Fuels, Friends of the Earth, Green Screen Coalition, Stand.Earth, Kairos Fellowship, Green Web Foundation, and Climate Action Against Disinformation, is the first analysis of greenwashing-style statements commonly used by NVIDIA, one of the world’s biggest beneficiary of the AI boom.
The briefing finds that NVIDIA’s indirect emissions have risen 725% since 2020, and undisclosed emissions from the use of sold chips could be nearly double that.
“The biggest AI profiteer also has one of the world’s most obscured and opaque climate footprints, ” said Ketan Joshi, research analyst and lead author of the report. “NVIDIA’s claims that AI has a ‘net climate benefit’ are a greenwashing tactic used by the industry to mask ballooning pollution”.
This briefing compiles Nvidia’s own indirect emissions disclosures back seven years from 2020 to 2026 to show for the first time that these emissions have risen by eight times. It also uses estimated chip power consumption to show emissions from the use of sold chips could be 21 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2025; of a comparable scale to the product-use emissions of state-owned Russian coal in 2024.
NVIDIA distracts from these emissions using three key claims. First, they claim AI’s development will be a ‘net benefit’ for climate. Second, they claim demand response for data centres enables renewable growth. And third, they herald energy efficiency as progress on sustainability. We debunk all three claims as misleading.
NVIDIA recently announced exclusive supply to an Ohio data centre reportedly set to be powered by what would be the world’s biggest gas plant with emissions worse than Nigeria’s entire power grid; an illustration that the company is projected to accelerate the global climate crisis even further through its enablement of the fossil-fuelled AI boom.
NVIDIA’s business lies primarily in chips manufactured in East Asia and sold across the world. The supply of raw materials for these chips and the manufacturing process are both incredibly energy-intensive. Once these chips are sold, they are used in similarly energy-intensive data centre buildings, now primarily for the purpose of operating generative AI. Both of these ‘ends’ are growing in their climate impacts.
“On this trajectory, the numbers shown in this briefing will look minuscule compared to the situation in 2030, or 2035,” said Joshi. “But NVIDIA can choose to take responsibility for what it buys and what it sells, and use its overwhelming power, influence and money to clean up the industry’s growing fossil-fuelled mess.”
We supported this report because the public is being sold a fantasy of ‘green’ AI while tech companies drive a massive build-out of emission-polluting data centres and fossil-fuel infrastructure. NVIDIA hypes up the climate benefits of its technologies while urging our governments to build fossil gas for data centres. This greenwashing designed to secure tech profits while locking our societies into more gas and energy dependence. Decision-makers must listen to people and deprioritise dirty data centres.
Learn more
Author Ketan Joshi walks through the main findings of the report in this video. Simon Clark recaps it in this hilarious short video.
Read the full report and more about our other joint research on AI greenwashing.
Access all the raw data, and figures
