Nvidia's indirect emissions — those that do not come from its own facilities but from the chain that makes and powers its chips — grew 725% between 2020 and 2026, according to a report released by a coalition of eight environmental organisations. In absolute terms, they climbed from 1.3 million to 10.7 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent.
The document, titled NVIDIA's Climate Hoax, was published on 17 September and its lead author is the analyst Ketan Joshi. It is signed by Greenpeace International, Beyond Fossil Fuels, Friends of the Earth, the Green Screen Coalition, Stand.earth, the Kairos Fellowship, the Green Web Foundation and Climate Action Against Disinformation.
The number that is not published
The report's central point is not what Nvidia discloses but what it does not: the energy consumed by the chips after they are sold, once they are running in other companies' data centres.
The researchers estimate that chips sold since 2022 generated, in 2025 alone, between 4 and 21 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent — a wide range because the result depends entirely on the electricity mix of each country where the machines are installed. At the upper end, the volume approaches that of a large Russian state coal producer, Russian Coal, the comparison that framed much of the coverage of the study.
It is worth noting what the width of that range means: the gap between 4 and 21 million tonnes is not uncertainty about how much energy the chips consume, but about where that energy comes from. The same hardware weighs five times as much on the climate if it is plugged into a coal-fired grid.
The methodology combined the scope 3 figures the company itself published across seven years of sustainability reports (2020 to 2026) with an estimate of the chips' electricity consumption in operation.
The three claims under challenge
The report is organised around three claims Nvidia makes publicly and that the authors consider untenable:
- that the development of artificial intelligence brings a net climate benefit;
- that data centre demand drives the expansion of renewable energy;
- that energy efficiency gains amount to environmental progress.
On the third point, the authors argue that efficiency per operation does not offset the growth in total consumption, since the number of machines is growing faster than the energy saved per unit.
The text also questions the company's emphasis on so-called demand response — temporarily cutting electricity use at peak hours. By the researchers' calculations, given the pace at which data centres are expanding, the practice would cover less than 1% of the year.
Among the examples cited is the announcement of exclusive chip supply to a data centre in Ohio, in the United States, to be powered by what would become the world's largest natural gas plant — with emissions greater than those of Nigeria's entire power grid.
What the company says
"NVIDIA's claims that AI has a 'net climate benefit' are a greenwashing tactic used by the industry to mask ballooning pollution," Joshi said.
Nvidia takes the opposite view. In a response reported by Euronews, the company says the deployment of artificial intelligence "is most likely to lead to net emissions reductions" and cites bodies such as the International Energy Agency (IEA) in support.
The coalition is calling on the company to start disclosing the emissions arising from the use of its chips and to present firmer evidence for the climate benefits it attributes to AI.
With information from the Green Web Foundation and Euronews.
