NVIDIA's latest corporate responsibility report shares our efforts in empowering employees and putting to work our technologies for the benefit of humanity.Amid ongoing global economic concerns and pandemic challenges, this year's report highlights our ability to attract and retain talent that come here to do their life's work while tackling some of the world's greatest technology and societal challenges.
Taking Care of Our People NVIDIA scored the highest grade for workplaces, ranking No. 1 on Glassdoor's Best Places to work list for large U.S. companies. Some 95% of employees indicated they'd recommend NVIDIA to a friend.
We make the health of our employees and their families a top priority. Our family leave policy allows U.S. employees 12 weeks of fully paid leave to care for family members. And we've selected eight days each year in which we shut down all but essential operations globally, so employees can unwind without having to return to a full inbox.
We've recently added surrogacy benefits and fertility education resources to our award-winning list of family-forming benefits, which include adoption support and a generous parental leave program of up to 22 weeks of fully paid leave.
And we worked with our LGBTQ+ colleagues to expand gender affirmation resources and support.
Supporting Communities Last year we established the Ignite program to prepare students from underrepresented communities for NVIDIA summer internships. Sixty-five percent of these students are returning for our internship program, and we saw a 100% increase in applications for this summer's Ignite program.
We supported professional organizations, including Black Women in AI, Women in Data and Women-ai, to increase access to AI education and technology.
We launched NVIDIA Emerging Chapters, a new program that enables developers in emerging regions to build and scale their AI, data science and graphics expertise through technology access, educational resources and co-marketing opportunities.
We announced a three-year partnership with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Western Pennsylvania to expand access to AI and robotics to students in communities traditionally underrepresented in tech. Core to this is an open-source curriculum that will make it easy for Boys & Girls Clubs nationwide to deliver AI education to their students.
Our employees remained committed to donating resources to those in need, with nearly 40% of them participating in the NVIDIA Foundation's Inspire 365 efforts during fiscal year 2022. That brought the unique participation rate since the initiative's start to 68%.
Despite in-person volunteering remaining paused due to COVID, NVIDIANs still logged more than 16,500 volunteer hours through individual and virtual efforts, up more than 76% from the previous fiscal year.
NVIDIANs also joined the company in contributing more than $22 million to charitable causes in the last fiscal year. And during the Ukraine crisis, employees and NVIDIA have donated more than $4.6 million to date for humanitarian relief.
Developing Climate Solutions NVIDIA GPUs are enabling progress in responding to the crisis of climate change. With recent advances in AI, modeling of weather forecasting can now be done 4-5 magnitudes faster than with traditional computing methods.
We plan to build Earth-2, an AI supercomputer that will create a digital twin of the Earth, enabling scientists to do ultra-high-resolution climate modeling and put tools into the hands of cities and nations to simulate the impact of mitigation and adaptation strategies.
Digital twins are also being used to predict costly maintenance at power plants and model new energy sources like fusion reactor design.
NVIDIA scientists along with leading institutions are using AI to model the most efficient way to capture greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and lock them away underground.
Startups from the NVIDIA Inception program are jumping into the climate challenge as well. In Kenya, a company is using AI to monitor the health of bee colonies. And a German startup is monitoring the ocean floor to help scientists understand how natural carbon sinks can be better utilized.
Building Energy-Efficient Technologies These solutions are not only bringing innovation to the climate challenge, but are built on a foundation of energy-efficient technology.
We aim to make every new generation of our GPUs faster and more energy efficient than its predecessor. As AI models and HPC applications increase exponentially in size, moving to new-generation GPUs will help our customers complete their work with lower energy consumption and get results more quickly.
NVIDIA GPUs are typically 20x more energy efficient for certain AI and HPC workloads than CPUs. If we switched accelerated computing workloads from CPU-only servers worldwide to GPU-accelerated systems, we estimate the world could save nearly 12 trillion watt-hours of energy a year, equivalent to the electricity requirements of nearly 1.7 million U.S. homes.
Leaning Into Trustworthy AI We're committed to the advancement of trustworthy AI, recognizing that technology can have a profound impact on people and the world. We've set priorities that are rooted in fostering positive change and enabling trust and transparency in AI development.
We're developing practices and methodologies enabling construction of AI products that are trustworthy by design, including datasets, machine learning tools and processes, AI model development, and software development and testing.
Running a Mission-Driven Company As NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang mentions in the opening letter of our corporate responsibility report, creating a place where people can do impactful work means building a culture strong enough to be willing to take on the most pressing problems.
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