Greenpeace to Nvidia's interim CEO: clean up Huang's 725% emissions mess

Jensen Huang is out at Nvidia, and Greenpeace is already knocking on his replacement's door. In a Thursday press release, the group's East Asia arm pushed interim CEO Colette Kress to commit the chipmaker to decarbonizing, investing in renewable energy and making sure its technology is used in a way that "respects human rights." Avex Li, Greenpeace East Asia's project lead for its AI supply chain campaign, accused Huang of failing to put climate responsibility at the heart of Nvidia's growth, failing to slow the "unchecked expansion" of data centers and failing to stop its chips from landing in applications like automated warfare. Nvidia didn't immediately respond to The Verge's request for comment.

The numbers behind the push are steep. Nvidia's supply-chain emissions have grown 725 percent since 2020, according to a September analysis of the company's public disclosures by research analyst Ketan Joshi and environmental organizations including Greenpeace and Climate Action Against Disinformation. That's a jump of about 9.4 million metric tons of planet-heating pollution, roughly what nearly 25 gas plants emit in a year. Nvidia's own latest sustainability report puts fiscal year 2026 supply chain emissions at around 10.7 million metric tons of CO2.

Joshi and his co-authors also took a crack at a category Nvidia leaves out of its reports: pollution from the chips it sells. Those emissions could have reached 21 million metric tons in 2025 based on estimated chip power consumption, a level the report compared to Russia's state-owned coal company. Nvidia's direct footprint looks tiny next to that, at 9,822 metric tons from company-operated facilities and vehicles in fiscal year 2026 — largely because Nvidia designs chips that manufacturers like TSMC build. The company did hit a 2025 goal of matching 100 percent of its facilities' electricity use with clean energy purchases; Greenpeace wants that promise stretched across the entire manufacturing supply chain.

Huang hasn't exactly been quiet on the subject. When Greenpeace activists disrupted his keynote at Nvidia GTC in Berlin last month, he told the room, "I'll talk to you guys later … All important issues, but let me get through my keynote." Greenpeace says the company has still never met with the organization despite two years of attempts to open a dialogue. Katrin Wu, a Big Tech campaigner at Greenpeace International, told The Verge that Huang's legacy includes inflating a speculative AI bubble and pouring billions into infrastructure with little regard for communities or the climate, adding: "Huang may be gone, but the 'tech colonialism' Nvidia perpetuates continues."

Huang's own pitch on climate cut both ways. On a September episode of The Ezra Klein Show he argued that leaning into AI is "the best opportunity we have" to turn a corner on climate change, saying AI's electricity demand is pushing companies toward cleaner energy. In the same interview he conceded data centers will depend on more fossil fuels in the near term and that building AI infrastructure would bring "an enormous amount of pain and suffering," comparing the technology to a surgeon who has "to cut you open to save you."

His reach went well past chips. Nvidia lobbied Washington to let it sell powerful chips to China, and its venture arm, NVentures, put money into battery recycler Redwood Materials and startups working on grid optimization. In September, Nvidia cofounded the AI Energy Management Alliance with Google and Emerald AI to promote tactics like on-site power generation and data centers that pause during peak demand. Some environmental groups counter that those fixes may simply get data centers online faster without shielding households from higher utility bills or worse air quality.