At NVIDIA, we work closely with our manufacturing partners to review and encourage them to improve their social and environmental performance. Our supply chain operations comprise two major divisions. Chip Operations designs our GPUs, and Board Operations designs the printed circuit boards (PCBs) that house electronic components in a computer. Both divisions are fabless (that is, they use subcontractors to do the manufacturing) and both work closely with approved vendors to follow international guidelines around responsible practices and material safety.

Our social responsibility policy and the EICC Code of Conduct provide a framework for addressing factory working conditions in our supply chain. We believe that, through our participation in collaborative industry initiatives such as the EICC, we can create more positive change in our supply chain, as opposed to working to implement change as a single company.

Since joining the EICC in 2006, we have leveraged our membership as an opportunity to raise awareness among our critical manufacturing suppliers, to improve factory working conditions in the areas of ethics, labor and working hours, environment, health and safety, and management systems.

To accomplish these goals, we integrate EICC training into our quarterly business reviews with our suppliers.

Supply Chain Goals

We are actively exploring how we can engage our suppliers in tracking environmental metrics related to the manufacturing of our products, such as the weight of materials, recycled inputs and the amount of energy or water used.

We are also working to:

• Reduce hazardous materials in our product components
• Improve testing of basic components to identify and minimize waste early in the manufacturing process
• Integrate waste management with quality control processes
• Recycle components of products that are not used
• Encourage the reduction, reuse, and recycling of packaging materials
• Raise awareness of the use of conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Encourage more suppliers to track and report their carbon footprint and find opportunities to improve efficiency in their operations
• Encourage adoption of the EICC code among a wider cross section of the electronics industry

We participated in the EICC carbon reporting process for 2009 to quantify emissions from our strategic suppliers. In 2010, we plan to partner with our chip operations suppliers to assess their water and energy usage and are inviting the suppliers of our large boards to participate in these assessments. We have also expanded the supplier list to include some of our IT vendors, increasing the scope and number of suppliers from which we requested data by 100 percent compared with 2009.