2 posts
Materials & hardware
Chips, copper, concrete, diesel and e-waste: the footprint before the first prompt.
The 164 kg of CO₂ inside every H100
NVIDIA's product carbon footprint puts an eight-GPU H100 baseboard at about 1,312 kg of CO₂e, roughly 164 kg per GPU, with memory the largest share. Multiply by a fleet and the manufacturing footprint rivals a year of operation.
17 kg per GPU: the e-waste wave of 2030
A Nature Computational Science study projects generative AI will produce up to 2.5 million tonnes of e-waste a year by 2030, a thousandfold increase on 2023. The index turns that into a figure per company: tonnes of servers that will be retired within five years.