The 164 kg of CO₂ inside every H100

ecogpt.coPublished Oct 19, 2026 · 2 min read

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.

Memory accounts for about 42% of the H100 baseboard's embodied carbon, integrated circuits 25%, thermal components 18%.
A host server adds more: the Jean Zay life-cycle study allocates 1,400 kg to a four-GPU node.
The index uses 514 kg per accelerator slot, chip plus share of host, and labels every result derived.
NVIDIA says the HGX B200 cuts embodied carbon per exaflop from 0.66 g to 0.50 g: better per unit of compute, more in total.

The product carbon footprint

NVIDIA publishes product carbon footprints for its data-centre systems, and the one for the eight-GPU H100 SXM baseboard is the number the index leans on: about 1,312 kg CO₂e, or 164 kg per GPU, emitted in manufacturing before the board is switched on. The breakdown, as reported by an industry analysis of the document, is memory 42%, integrated circuits 25% and thermal components 18%. High-bandwidth memory is dense, hot to make and stacked in quantity; it is the single largest term.

The server around the chip

A GPU does not run alone. The Jean Zay supercomputer's life-cycle assessment, which drew on NVIDIA's figures, allocates about 1,400 kg CO₂e to a dual-CPU host node and 164 kg to each of its four H100s, so a four-GPU node carries about 2,056 kg. Per GPU slot that is roughly 350 kg of host plus 164 kg of chip. The index rounds the total to 514 kg per accelerator slot and applies it to every fleet, labelling the output derived and printing the arithmetic on the profile.

What a fleet carries

Google's roughly 5.1 million H100-equivalents, by Epoch's estimate, would carry about 2.6 million tonnes of embodied CO₂e on that basis; Microsoft's 3.5 million about 1.8 million tonnes. For comparison, Google's entire operational (Scope 1 and 2) emissions are a fraction of its 11.5 million tonne total, and its Scope 3, where this manufacturing sits, rose 25% in 2025. The embodied number is not an addition to the company's reported footprint; it is a slice of the Scope 3 the companies already report, made visible per chip.

Better per flop, worse in total

NVIDIA's developer blog states the embodied carbon intensity of computing at 0.66 g CO₂e per exaflop for the HGX H100 and 0.50 g for the HGX B200. Each generation does more work per kilogram of manufacturing emissions. Each generation is also heavier, hotter and shipped in larger numbers; NVIDIA's own Scope 3 doubled to 6.9 million tonnes in fiscal 2025 as Blackwell ramped. Intensity falls and totals rise, the pattern of the whole industry.

The caveats

The 164 kg figure reaches us second-hand from analyses citing NVIDIA's document; the Jean Zay authors note their GPU figures follow a partial scope; host configurations vary enormously, and 4 TB of DRAM alone can add over a tonne. The index's factor is a central estimate, stated with its sources on the methodology page, and the profiles say so. The point is not precision. It is that a number exists, and that a fleet of millions multiplies it into something no sustainability report prints on its own.