AI’s next injustice? NVIDIA is powering the Western AI dominance with emissions dumped in Asia

Jensen Huang recently announced a major deal for Korea: 260,000 of NVIDIA’s latest chips are heading there with the government and big manufacturers involved. However, does Korea have that much energy to power this? Or do they just continue to drill for more fossil fuels??

A new analysis looked at how big AI companies are cutting supply-chain emissions. NVIDIA is doing the worst, and most of those emissions come from its supply chain in East Asia.

Some numbers from the report:

• Supply-chain emissions can make up as much as 98% of an AI company’s total footprint
• NVIDIA’s supplier emissions have more than doubled in three years
• Over 75% of global chips are made in East Asia
• AI chip production could use as much power as a small country by 2030

Obviously power grids in the region aren’t catching up. Now governments in the region are using the AI boom to justify expanding fossil fuels and nuclear, saying they “need stable power for AI development.” Even Jensen Huang has publicly suggested that nuclear expansion might be the answer. It feels like AI is being built on someone else’s risks.

So far, NVIDIA hasn’t offered any plan to help suppliers shift to renewable energy…