From Rainforests to Recycling Plants: 5 Ways NVIDIA AI Is Protecting the Planet

NVIDIA AI is helping protect the planet across climate, conservation, disaster monitoring, and recycling. 5 projects were introduced for this Earth Day.

• Earth-2: The world's first fully open accelerated weather AI software stack, accelerating everything from early observational data processing to 15-day global forecasts and regional storm forecasting.
• Earth-2 Nowcasting: Generative AI turns national-scale forecasts into kilometer-resolution, 0-6 hour regional storm and hazardous weather predictions delivered within minutes.
• Earth-2 Global Data Assimilation: Creates global snapshots of temperature, wind speed, humidity, and pressure in minutes on a single GPU. This model architecture, HealDA, was developed in collaboration with NOAA, MITRE, and MIT.

In wildlife conservation, GPU-accelerated AI is dramatically cutting down on time. In research across Borneo and Sumatra, orangutan nest detection from aerial imagery has been automated, processing an hour's worth of drone footage far faster than traditional manual review.

• One study implemented a model that processes 1,800 images in under 5 minutes on a single GPU.
• In another study, an InceptionV3-based model achieved over 99% accuracy and precision in classifying nest presence.
• All three orangutan species are endangered, with populations having declined by more than 80% over the past 75 years.

In recycling, AMP is using AI and robotics to boost sorting efficiency. AMP has already diverted over 2 billion pounds of material from landfills, preventing an estimated 739,000 metric tons CO2e in emissions.

• AMP facilities achieve a 90% recovery rate, compared to about 75% at typical plants.
• NVIDIA Hopper GPUs have cut AI inference energy consumption in half.
• Compared to traditional facilities of the same scale, they use roughly two-thirds the number of conveyor belts, reducing resource and power usage.

Beyond this, researchers are also developing tsunami early warning systems, and expanding the use of Earth observation AI with Planet's Earth observation data. Overall, NVIDIA is using accelerated computing to transform what were once slow, labor-intensive environmental, disaster, and conservation tasks into near-real-time systems.