Sustainable Computing

Save energy, lower costs, and mitigate climate change with AI and accelerated computing.

Ansys, Siemens Gamesa

Overview

What Is Sustainable Computing?

Sustainable computing encompasses the entire lifecycle of technology, including its environmental impact. NVIDIA is helping to enable sustainable computing by providing the most energy-efficient infrastructure, empowering research and design across various industries. From weather forecasting to chip manufacturing, accelerated computing holds the potential to realize green computing objectives while saving costs.

Driving Energy Efficiency and Lifesaving Innovations With Sustainable Computing

NVIDIA accelerated computing has made AI tasks dramatically more energy efficient—using 100,000 times less power than a decade ago—enabling faster and more sustainable breakthroughs in areas such as drug discovery and climate monitoring.

Transforming Data Centers Into AI Factories for the Fifth Industrial Revolution

Sustainable computing is driving the transformation of data centers into energy-efficient AI infrastructure. Learn from NVIDIA’s Wade Vinson in the DC AC keynote to prepare for this shift.

Benefits

How Sustainable Becomes Meaningful

Sustainable computing drives continuous innovation for real-world impact.

Improve Environmental Footprints

Enhance energy and water efficiency while minimizing waste and emissions across various industries.

Discover New Materials

Develop new industrial materials for batteries, wind turbines, paint, and more to reduce reliance on traditional, less sustainable solutions.

Accelerate Scientific Research

Discover new green energy sources, make planetary-scale climate predictions, mitigate wildfires, and advance drug discovery. 

Optimize Resources

Design better chips, optimize power grids, and streamline delivery routes to save energy and reduce costs.

The Energy Efficiency of NVIDIA Blackwell Inference

Maximizing AI energy efficiency starts with leaps in inference performance. Blackwell Ultra with NVFP4 delivers 4x throughput and 50x more energy efficiency per token, boosting energy cost savings across inference workloads.

Products

Technology That Powers Change

Build AI infrastructure—and a brighter future—with the market’s most energy-efficient data center technology.

NVIDIA Blackwell

  • The NVIDIA Blackwell architecture powers the next generation of AI factories, ushering in the age of AI reasoning.
  • NVIDIA Blackwell defines the next chapter in generative AI with unmatched performance, efficiency, and scale.
  • The NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 redefines AI reasoning inference performance with a 50x leap in AI factory output.

NVIDIA NVLink

  • NVIDIA NVLink™ is an ultra-high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect technology used for GPU-to-GPU communication, enabling massive model parallelism and faster AI and HPC performance at scale.
  • NVLink 5.0 delivers over 5x the energy efficiency of PCIe Gen5—consuming just 1.3 picojoules per bit for data transfers.  
  • NVLink is the most power-efficient interconnect for massive real-time inference workloads, contributing to the 25x greater performance per watt for NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 compared to the prior generation.

NVIDIA Networking

  • NVIDIA’s co-packaged optics (CPO) switches with integrated silicon photonics provide 3.5x better power efficiency, 10x higher network resiliency, and 1.3x faster time to deploy compared to traditional networks.
  • NVIDIA BlueField data processing units (DPUs) can reduce power consumption by 30%, resulting in a $56 million savings for large data centers. Check out all of NVIDIA’s test results on the power consumption of various DPUs.

NVIDIA CUDA-X

  • NVIDIA CUDA-X™, built on top of CUDA®, is a collection of microservices, libraries, tools, and technologies for building applications that deliver dramatically higher performance with energy efficiency considerations.
  • Built by CUDA experts at NVIDIA, CUDA-X software is easy to integrate, customize, and deploy in data processing, AI, and HPC applications.

NVIDIA Dynamo

  • The NVIDIA Dynamo open-source inference framework serves as the operating system for AI factories, designed to accelerate and scale AI with maximum efficiency and minimal cost.
  • By intelligently orchestrating inference requests across large-scale, multi-node distributed environments, Dynamo ensures that AI factories can maximize token revenue generation at the lowest possible cost, driving sustained margin growth.

NVIDIA Earth-2

  • NVIDIA Earth-2 uses AI, GPU acceleration, physical simulations, and computer graphics to simulate and visualize global weather and climate predictions with high accuracy and speed. 
  • The platform offers development tools, microservices, and AI-driven reference implementations for visualization and simulation. NVIDIA NIM™ microservices for Earth-2 enable users to apply AI-accelerated models for optimizing and simulating real-world climate and weather outcomes.

Use Cases

Accelerated Efficiency in Action

Explore a few ways NVIDIA's energy-efficient accelerated computing powers a more sustainable future.

Weather Forecasting

NVIDIA’s Earth-2 platform utilizes AI-driven weather models, such as CorrDiff and FourCastNet, to deliver ultra-high-resolution, energy-efficient weather forecasts significantly faster than traditional approaches. 

These models enable rapid, accurate prediction of extreme weather events down to the kilometer scale, supporting applications in disaster preparedness, renewable energy management, and risk assessment—often at thousands of times the speed and efficiency of previous supercomputer-based simulations.

This technology enables governments, researchers, and industries to make more informed decisions, protecting communities and infrastructure from climate-related risks.

Renewable Energy

Siemens Gamesa is leveraging NVIDIA’s digital twin platform—powered by Omniverse and AI frameworks like Modulus—to create highly accurate virtual models of entire wind farms. This enables rapid, real-time simulation of turbine placement and wake effects, optimizing layouts to boost energy output by up to 20% compared to previous designs and cutting simulation times from weeks to minutes.

By accelerating this process, Siemens Gamesa can maximize clean energy generation, lower operational costs, and more effectively support the global transition to renewable power.

Efficient Chip Design

Computational lithography—a core step in chip manufacturing—demands enormous computing power, and traditional CPU-based methods have become a bottleneck as workloads rapidly outpace hardware scaling. 

NVIDIA’s cuLitho leverages GPU acceleration on the Hopper™ architecture to speed up lithography by 40x, reduce energy and space requirements by up to 9x and 8x, respectively, and cut mask processing time from weeks to overnight. In partnership with leaders such as TSMC, ASML, and Synopsys, cuLitho is transforming silicon production, enabling new advanced techniques and helping to make semiconductor technologies more efficient, predictable, and cost-effective.

Fluid Dynamics

Industrial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is extremely resource- and energy-intensive, consuming approximately 25 billion CPU core hours annually. By adopting GPU acceleration and AI-powered frameworks like NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo™, leading CFD software providers and platforms now achieve up to 36x faster simulations, while drastically reducing energy use and costs compared to traditional CPU-only systems. For example, running GPU-accelerated clusters can save $19 million and 37 GWh of energy compared to equivalent CPU infrastructure, making high-fidelity CFD much more sustainable and supporting companies in their efforts to reduce carbon emissions and achieve net zero.

Data Analytics

The NVIDIA RAPIDS™ Accelerator for Apache Spark utilizes GPUs to accelerate end-to-end data science and analytics pipelines, enabling enterprises to complete Spark workloads up to 6x faster without code changes. This results in up to 5x lower infrastructure costs and 6x less power consumption, helping typical organizations save nearly $125 million and reduce energy use by 10 GWh compared to CPU-only solutions. By enabling scalable, efficient, and interactive analytics for use cases such as demand forecasting and fraud detection, the accelerator supports both advanced insights and sustainability goals.

Rendering Photoreal Visual Effects

Rendering high-quality visual effects and animation is extremely resource- and energy-intensive, consuming nearly 10 billion CPU core hours annually and creating significant carbon emissions. 

By switching to NVIDIA RTX™ GPU acceleration, leading studios have achieved performance boosts of up to 46x, while reducing energy use by 10X and capital expenses by 6x compared to CPU-based render farms. This shift enables studios to deliver photorealistic scenes more quickly and more sustainably, with the potential to save the industry $900 million and 215 GWh of energy worldwide.


Resources

Explore Green Computing

Stay ahead of the rapidly evolving conversation about sustainable computing solutions and best practices for building and operating AI infrastructure.  

Energy Efficiency Blogs

Article

Busting the Top Myths About AI and Energy Efficiency

Debunking the myth that AI is driving unsustainable energy use, learn how advances in accelerated computing are boosting efficiency—and how AI is actively helping industries save energy across the global economy.  

Article

Why NVIDIA’s Energy-Intensive Chips Could‌ Help Save the Climate

NVIDIA is revolutionizing AI’s energy consumption for a better planet. Learn how from Dion Harris, one of NVIDIA’s driving forces behind reducing AI’s environmental footprint.

Video Interview

How NVIDIA’s Blackwell Chips Can Help Solve AI’s Energy Problem

NVIDIA Blackwell is engineered to deliver 25x more energy efficiency, making it a leader in sustainable computing for AI workloads.

Driving Energy Efficiency and Lifesaving Innovations With Sustainable Computing

Discover how NVIDIA accelerated computing enables energy-efficient AI breakthroughs.

Building Energy-Efficient AI Infrastructure with Equinix and NVIDIA

See how Equinix and NVIDIA are building the foundation for tomorrow’s AI breakthroughs.

How AI and Accelerated Computing Are Driving Energy Efficiency

Hear from NVIDIA’s Josh Parker (Head of Sustainability) on how NVIDIA’s twin engines—AI and accelerated computing—are revolutionizing energy efficiency across industries.

NVIDIA Inception key visual

Evolve Your Energy and Climate AI Startups With NVIDIA Inception

Next Steps

Explore NVIDIA Sustainable Computing

From liquid cooling technology to energy-efficient infrastructure, NVIDIA is creating sustainable computing solutions today to help build a better tomorrow.

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