{"id":76649,"date":"2026-04-24T16:14:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-24T16:14:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/usa\/?p=76649"},"modified":"2026-04-24T16:16:39","modified_gmt":"2026-04-24T16:16:39","slug":"behind-nvidias-record-profits-a-growing-climate-disaster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenpeace.org\/usa\/behind-nvidias-record-profits-a-growing-climate-disaster\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind Nvidia’s record profits: a growing climate disaster"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Protest
On the opening day of Nvidia’s GTC (Global Technology Centers) conference, Greenpeace USA drove a triple-billboard truck to deliver a direct message to CEO Jensen Huang.
\u00a9 Brooke Anderson \/ Greenpeace<\/div><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n

As AI dominates public attention, markets, and investor interest, focus has turned to major tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, and Meta. These tech giants have received major scrutiny for their approaches<\/a> to building the data centers for their contested<\/a> AI products \u2013 but the companies providing critical hardware have received less scrutiny. The supply chain<\/a> emissions and environmental impacts for the chips required for the AI boom are proving to be just as consequential as data centers themselves. Enter the industry leader: Nvidia. <\/p>\n\n

The environmental impacts of Big Tech\u2019s desperate buildout of data centers has received significant backlash \u2013 and for good reason. The public pressure to stop data center projects for fear of ratepayer impacts, grid instability, emissions, and water scarcity has even led legislatures to propose a moratorium<\/a> to Congress. <\/p>\n\n

Nvidia is a Silicon Valley-based tech company led by CEO, president, and co-founder Jensen Huang. Nvidia’s core business model is the design and development of graphics processing units (GPUs), semiconductors, and chips. Originally focused on gaming applications, Nvidia has expanded into AI and other advanced computing and is now the top supplier for almost all other Big Tech companies. They are now the first company to reach a $5 trillion valuation<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

In February 2026, Nvidia announced<\/a> a record $215.9 billion in revenue, and a quarterly revenue of $62.3 billion from data center projects alone. The earnings reflect a tour de force of Nvidia\u2019s contracts across the industry, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Meta, CoreWeave, Anthropic, plus robotics, automobiles, gaming companies, public initiatives like the U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s Genesis Mission.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n

Yet the dominance of Nvidia\u2019s semiconductor supply and the data center buildout that Huang actively encourages<\/a> comes at a huge, and largely hidden, environmental cost. Data centers are not the only place major climate and environmental impacts are building up. Greenpeace East Asia has been investigating the sustainability of the tech supply chain for years. Because so much of the supply chain for tech exists outside of the U.S., this critical part of the picture is woefully underappreciated by U.S. media coverage. But the impacts on climate are tremendous and wildly more difficult to track than data centers alone \u2013 making Nvidia\u2019s role in incentivizing the expansion without guardrails all the more concerning.<\/p>\n\n

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