As Nvidia's flagship GTC conference opened in San Jose, California, Greenpeace USA launched a mobile protest in the heart of Silicon Valley on March 16, targeting the semiconductor giant's continued reliance on fossil fuels to power what it calls the "AI Revolution."
Billboards in Silicon Valley
Ahead of CEO Jensen Huang's keynote address, a triple-billboard truck began circling the SAP Center in San Jose, delivering a blunt message: "Hey Jensen, your GPUs powering the AI boom are overheating. So is the planet." The installation framed a stark choice for the world's most valuable company — "Powering the Apocalypse" through fossil-fuel dependence, or "Powering the Future" through a transition to wind and solar.
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93% Emissions Surge in Three Years
The protest coincides with the release of Greenpeace East Asia's report,Nvidia's Green Illusion, which found that Nvidia's total carbon emissions surged 93% between 2023 and 2025 as revenues soared — with 87% of those emissions originating from its East Asian supply chain. Half of Nvidia's top 20 hardware manufacturing suppliers produce critical components in Taiwan, where over 80% of the power grid still runs on fossil fuels.
Lena Chang (張皪心), Climate and Energy Project Director at Greenpeace, said Nvidia's supply chain emissions now rival the carbon footprints of some nations, yet the company has taken no meaningful action to address them. "A world-class new-generation chip should be produced using wind and solar, not fossil fuels," she said. "Nvidia must take action to mitigate the environmental dilemma its business has created."
Huang has described energy as the indispensable foundation of AI's "five-layer cake" structure — yet Taiwan, the core of Nvidia's supply chain, is bearing the carbon cost of that energy demand. Taiwan's state utility Taipower projects that semiconductor-related power consumption will grow 2.5 times over the next five years, with annual demand additions jumping from 400,000 kilowatts historically to one million kilowatts — pushing the island's energy transition into a deepening bind.
Despite reporting record-breaking revenues last month, Nvidia received an "F" grade in Greenpeace East Asia's 2025 ranking of 10 global AI giants, placing last among its peers on decarbonization and renewable energy adoption.
Part of a Global Campaign
Susannah Compton, Civic Resistance and Freedoms Campaigner at Greenpeace International, said: "Nvidia's chips power the AI boom, but the company's innovation obsession clearly doesn't extend to a livable planet because its supply chain is still built on fossil fuels. While Big Tech billionaires like Jensen Huang cash in, people and the planet pay the cost of surging emissions in rising bills and extreme weather."
The San Jose action is part of a broader global campaign by Greenpeace organizations against tech industry leaders who, the group argues, prioritize unchecked business expansion over ecological limits and public well-being.
Greenpeace is calling on Nvidia to transition its global supply chain to renewable energy, invest directly in new wind and solar projects — particularly in manufacturing regions such as Taiwan and South Korea — and publish transparent annual supplier electricity and emissions data.
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