Nvidia’s supply chain emissions surged 725% since 2020, now rival a Russian coal producer

Nvidia’s meteoric rise as the engine behind the AI revolution comes with a carbon receipt that keeps getting longer. A coalition of environmental and civil society organizations, including Greenpeace International, has published a report showing the chipmaker’s supply chain emissions have climbed 725% since fiscal year 2020. The numbers are hard to ignore. Nvidia’s Scope 3 emissions, which cover the broader supply chain rather than just its own offices and factories, grew from 1.3 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in fiscal 2020 to approximately 10.7 million tonnes in fiscal 2026. That’s an additional 9.4 million tonnes of carbon over six years, driven almost entirely by the insatiable global appetite for GPUs and AI training infrastructure. The emissions Nvidia doesn’t report The supply chain figures are only part of the story. Climate analyst Ketan Joshi, who led the research, estimates that downstream emissions from the actual use of Nvidia’s sold chips could reach as high as 21 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2025. That’s nearly double the supply chain emissions themselves. To put that in perspective, the report compares that figure to the reported emissions of Russian Coal,...