Innovation, Inclusion, Impact: Highlights from Our Annual Corporate Social Responsibility Report

Our 12th annual report reflects on a year like no other — and shares a look ahead.
June 25, 2021 by Tonie Hansen

NVIDIA’s 12th annual corporate social responsibility report, published today, shares our progress — and plans — to take care of employees, reach new sustainability goals and channel our tech to support the global community.

Following a year of global hardship — the ongoing battle against the COVID-19 pandemic, social unrest and renewed calls for racial justice, natural disasters exacerbated by global warming — the report highlights our efforts to meet these crises with both innovation and empathy.

“Through the decades, we have stayed close to our principles because we believe in them,” writes NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang in a letter introducing the report. “This year we were reminded that these principles aren’t just about building a great company and leaving the world in better shape than we found it. We learned that the company we’ve built, all of us, has great power to improve lives.”

Our key initiatives and corresponding outcomes include:

  1. Taking Care of Our People and Communities During Times of Crisis

The pandemic allowed companies to show the importance of putting people first. At NVIDIA, we promised no layoffs and pledged, instead, to move up salary increases to support families. Vendors and contractors — such as workers in our café and janitorial services — have been paid even while sites have been closed. Company-wide efforts support the thousands of employees still working from home.

When families were further hit by wildfires in the U.S., COVID-19 surges in India and civil unrest in multiple regions, we reached out with additional resources. Our philanthropic arm, the NVIDIA Foundation, encouraged employee giving — but NVIDIANs went above and beyond, contributing $17 million to help thousands of organizations worldwide, including over $1 million in response to the recent devastating COVID surge in India.

  1. Strengthening Diversity and Inclusion, in the Workplace and Beyond

Over the past year, we moved to create new opportunities to advance diversity and inclusion companywide and in our developer ecosystem.

We made strong outreach efforts in recruiting and tripled the number of Black employees in our workforce. And we began tracking promotion parity and improved transparency by sharing additional detail about our pay practices in the corporate social responsibility report.

We’re also launching an immersion program for first- and second-year students at historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions to motivate and encourage the continuation of computer science and engineering studies.

Our most recent GPU Technology Conference attracted more than 20,000 developers from emerging markets, hundreds of women speakers and a variety of session topics discussing diversity and inclusion in AI. Compared to last fall’s event, it saw a 6x increase in female attendees, a 6x jump in Black attendees and a 5x boost in Hispanic and Latino attendees.

  1. Protecting People and the Planet with Our Products

NVIDIA technology has long been used to accelerate applications with social impact. Since the pandemic began, teams across the company have worked on hundreds of initiatives with researchers, scientists, leading healthcare organizations and governments worldwide to fight COVID-19.

We’re a member of the COVID-19 HPC Consortium, which bolsters coronavirus research with the world’s most powerful computing resources. And startups and leading researchers around the globe are using NVIDIA technology to simulate the virus at the molecular level, detect COVID-19 in CT scans and create touch-free AI platforms to safely monitor hospital patients.

The NVIDIA GPUs behind these projects aren’t just optimized for performance — parallel processing on GPUs consumes up to 42x less energy than traditional CPUs. The NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD system captured the top spot on the latest Green500 ranking of most efficient supercomputers and set a new world record in power efficiency. NVIDIA-powered machines are featured in 26 of the list’s top 30 spots. We also announced the 400-petaflops Cambridge-1 supercomputer, our first to use 100 percent renewable energy.

We strive to improve data center energy efficiency in design, construction, and operations, and we evaluate sustainability criteria when procuring new sites. Our key data centers are certified to the ISO 50001 energy management standard, and we have a goal to source 65 percent of our energy use from renewables by 2025.

These and other efforts have been met with widespread recognition. NVIDIA has in recent months ranked highly on lists including:

We’re also included in the following indexes: the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index, Dow Jones Sustainability Index, Investor’s Business Daily’s 2020 Best ESG Companies List, Corporate Knight’s 2021 Global 100 index, MIT and Glassdoor’s Culture 500 and the Corporate Equality Index, a U.S. benchmark for LGBTQ workplace inclusion.

Learn more about corporate sustainability at NVIDIA here. For additional detail, read the full 2021 report.