AMD examines corporate responsibility (CR) through the lens of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. A CSR interview in India with Suzanne Moore, Vice President of AMD responsible for Corporate Responsibility and Global Government Affairs.
How has AMD’s approach to corporate social responsibility evolved during the pandemic?
As the pandemic began to unfold in early 2020, we moved quickly to meet the challenges by implementing best practices to protect the health and safety of our global workforce, maintain business continuity for our customers and support our communities by reallocating and increasing our essential resources. semiconductor technology and resources to fight.
To accelerate COVID-related research, we created the AMD High-Performance Compute (HPC) Fund and donated high-performance systems powered by AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct GPUs to key research institutions around the world. With 12 petaflops of total supercomputing capacity given, the combined computing capacity would rank among the fastest supercomputers in the world.
In addition, in financial grants to non-profit organizations, we have focused on humanitarian aid and medical aid. We also offered matching gift programs that leveraged the generosity of our employees. Through combined COVID-19 response efforts, AMD has provided more than US$26 million to universities, research institutes and community organizations, including donations of technology, personal protective equipment and corporate donations and employees in June 2021.
How has AMD supported communities in India to fight the pandemic?
With input from our Indian workforce and partners, AMD has focused its efforts on resilience, relief and recovery. The sudden and rapid spread of COVID-19 has placed unprecedented pressure on local health systems and the livelihoods of AMD communities.
Through our HPC fund, AMD has donated an HPC cluster to CSIR-4PI in Bengaluru to help find some of the country’s brightest minds. Research proposals for assigned use of this cluster are accepted beginning in December 2021. Together with mentors and collaborators from CSIR-4PI, IITs, and other agencies, we look forward to seeing results that may deepen the understanding of COVID-19 and improving the ability to respond to potential future threats to global health.
In several states, we have also worked with local leaders to help purchase and deploy essential health equipment. We partnered with an NGO to donate essential respiratory care equipment to Karnataka’s state health system and worked together with government officials and others to help establish the first-ever COVID testing facility -19 state-of-the-art technology from Gurugram. AMD and its employees helped provide diagnostic and imaging equipment to Victoria Government Hospital in Bangalore and remote monitoring machines to Government General and Chest Hospital in Hyderabad.
When we saw a peak of the pandemic in early 2021, AMD employees at 25 locations around the world donated to nonprofits in India to help community kitchens, awareness campaigns, education initiatives and the distribution of PPE kits. Additionally, our local staff have implemented fast communication processes at AMD India, to assist each other with real-time needs, which has expanded workplace camaraderie in new ways.
Overall, throughout the pandemic, AMD has donated more than $2.2 million in cash and in-kind to efforts in India ranging from daily dry rations to HPC activation for research on COVID-19.
What is the premise of AMD’s corporate social responsibility approach?
Corporate responsibility (CR) represents an integral aspect of how we do business, through which we aim to generate shared value with our employees, customers, suppliers, investors and communities. We approach corporate responsibility from the perspective of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. This approach allows us to prioritize where we need to focus our efforts to have the most impact, operationalize goals and measure progress.
As we address a wide range of ESG-related issues, based on feedback from our stakeholders, we focus on four strategic areas. Through Digital Impact, we aim to enable STEM education, scientific research and the workforce of the future. We also focus on environmental stewardship through our products and operations. As part of our supply chain responsibility program, we work with suppliers to advance the social and environmental conditions of workers around the world. Additionally, we focus on diversity, belonging and inclusion among our employees to continuously advance our company’s achievements in innovation and performance. Our approach is based on business ethics, security and transparency.
We also map our priority issues and our progress against the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. We recognize that no company can effectively address these challenges alone, which is why we embrace strategic industry partnerships and cross-industry collaborations to help advance technology solutions to issues facing our industry and society at large.
Overall, we see companies setting ambitious goals to reduce their environmental footprint. What is AMD doing in this regard?
We recognize that our ambitions for environmental stewardship must go beyond slowing the growth of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We want to help reduce absolute emissions across all industries and the associated negative impacts on the ecosystem. That’s why AMD is charting a bold course to advance the power efficiency of accelerated computing applications. From 2020 to 2025, we are striving to increase the energy efficiency of AMD processors and accelerators powering servers for AI and HPC training by 30 times.
We have also set a science-based GHG reduction target for our operations and are working with our suppliers to increase the efficient use of resources and renewable energy. From 2020 to 2030, we are targeting a 50% reduction in absolute GHG emissions from AMD operations. We also aim for 100% of our manufacturing suppliers to have public emission reduction targets and for 80% to source renewable energy by 2025.
What is AMD’s approach to diversity and inclusion?
At AMD, we welcome innovators from diverse backgrounds to help us create technology solutions for some of the world’s toughest challenges. Our inclusion initiatives foster a work environment that allows all employees to participate and thrive, which in turn creates a sense of community and purpose. We call this “belonging”.
We are committed to increasing diversity, belonging and inclusion (DB&I) within our workforce to recognize different perspectives and experiences, challenge the status quo when necessary, and drive innovation and commercial performance. We have set a target for 70% of our employees to participate in AMD Employee Resource Groups or other AMD inclusion initiatives by 2025. We are committed to increasing the percentage of global hires women in engineering roles. For 2021, we have made DB&I efforts a component of our company’s strategic metrics and milestones to inform our employee incentive plan.
To help inform our company’s progress, in our annual AMDer survey, we ask employees several questions about how our culture and processes support our commitment to DB&I. The answers to these questions and the overall index score in the top 10% of global technology companies. In 2020, we were recognized by Best Places to Work for LGBTQ Equality, Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index, and Forbes Most Just US Companies.
