Invest1 publisher2 min readPublished
Nvidia's reported supply-chain emissions almost tripled in two fiscal years to 10.7 million tonnes
A coalition report led by climate analyst Ketan Joshi puts Nvidia's fiscal 2026 Scope 3 at about 10.7 million tonnes against 1.3 million in fiscal 2020, and estimates the emissions from using its sold chips at as much as 21 million.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- A coalition of environmental and civil society groups, Greenpeace International among them, reported that Nvidia's Scope 3 emissions went from 1.3 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in fiscal 2020 to about 10.7 million in fiscal 2026.
- Climate analyst Ketan Joshi, who led the research, estimates that emissions from the use of the chips Nvidia has sold could reach as high as 21 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2025.
- The report sets that downstream figure against the reported emissions of Russian Coal, one of Russia's major coal producers.
- Nvidia says it has run its own operations on 100% renewable electricity for two consecutive years, which gives it zero market-based Scope 2 emissions.
- Nvidia has not yet issued a detailed public response to the specific claims in the report.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint Nvidia's headline environmental claim sits entirely in Scope 2, so the disclosure it leads with cannot answer a challenge aimed at the line that grew 725%, and critics in the report call the framing greenwashing on exactly that ground.
- decision Nvidia now chooses between contesting Joshi's method and leaving an outside researcher's estimate as the only published number for emissions from using its chips.
- precedent An outside estimate of use-phase emissions running close to twice a vendor's own supply-chain disclosure gives campaigners a template that any AI hardware supplier with a published Scope 3 line can be measured against.
Nvidia's Scope 3 line grew 725 per cent [1], and in tonnes that is 9.4 million added between fiscal 2020 and fiscal 2026 [2]. Of that, 7.06 million arrived in the last two of those years [12]. The reported figure went from 3.64 million tonnes in fiscal 2024 to 10.7 million in fiscal 2026 [7], a 2.9-fold rise [14] and three-quarters of the entire six-year increase [13].
The report attributes the growth to manufacturing. Leading-edge fabrication, predominantly handled by TSMC in Taiwan, takes large amounts of energy, ultrapure water and specialty chemicals. The emissions embedded in it scaled with Nvidia's order volumes [8]. Taken at face value, that makes the Scope 3 series a coarse index of how much leading-edge output Nvidia bought, and on that reading the output roughly tripled in two fiscal years [14]. The reading holds only if the accounting boundary is the same in both years, because restating which categories get counted would produce the same step without a single extra wafer.
Joshi's downstream figure, as high as 21 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2025 [3], is 1.96 times the fiscal 2026 supply-chain number [15], which is where "nearly double" comes from. The two cover different periods and come from different parties: one is an outside estimate for 2025, the other Nvidia's own disclosure for fiscal 2026 [18].
Huang has argued repeatedly that AI-driven efficiency gains across other industries will more than offset the energy needed to run the models [9]. The International Energy Agency has flagged AI-driven data centre growth as a significant factor in its energy forecasts [10]. What the report does is put a tonnage against Huang's claim. The 21 million tonnes is the top of an estimated range [3].
For a holder of the stock, this is a contested disclosure and not yet a cash item: the report attaches no monetary figure, no carbon price and no named regulation to any of it [17]. In my view the thesis worth holding is the narrower one, that Nvidia's Scope 3 line has become a usable volume signal [14]. The way to break it is to find a change of accounting boundary between fiscal 2024 and fiscal 2026 that explains the step. On the report's own account, the growth tracks order volumes [8].
What to watch
- Whether TSMC's own disclosures show a matching rise in fabrication emissions across the same two fiscal years.
- Any carbon price or disclosure rule that attaches a cost to use-phase emissions from sold chips.
- Whether the coalition publishes the method behind the 21 million tonne top-end estimate.