AMD looks at Corporate Responsibility (CR) through the lens of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. An India CSR Interview with Susan Moore, AMD Corporate Vice President of Corporate Responsibility, and International 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 navigate 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 re-allocating and increasing our essential semiconductor technology and resources to the fight.
To accelerate COVID-related research, we created the AMD High-Performance Compute (HPC) Fund and donated high-performance systems powered by AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs to key research institutions worldwide. With 12 petaflops of total supercomputing capacity donated, the combined compute capacity would rank among the fastest supercomputers in the world.
Additionally, in financial grants to nonprofit organizations we shifted focus to humanitarian relief and medical aid. We also offered matching gift programs multiplying our employees’ generosity. Through combined COVID-19 response efforts, AMD has provided more than $26 million USD to universities, research institutes and community organizations, including donations of technology, personal protective equipment, and corporate and employee giving as of June 2021.
How did AMD support communities in India to fight the pandemic?
With input from our Indian workforce and partners, AMD has focused our efforts on resilience, relief, and recovery. The sudden and rapid spread of COVID-19 placed unprecedented pressure on local health systems and livelihoods in AMD communities.
Through our HPC Fund, AMD donated an HPC cluster to CSIR-4PI in Bengaluru to help enable research from some of the country’s brightest minds. Research proposals for allocated use of this cluster are being accepted as of December 2021. Along with mentors and collaborators across CSIR-4PI, IITs and other agencies, we are keen to see results that may deepen understanding of COVID-19 and improve the ability to respond to future potential threats to global health.
Across several states, we also worked with local leaders to help procure and deploy critical healthcare equipment. We partnered with an NGO to donate critical respiratory care equipment to the Karnataka state healthcare system and worked in concert with public officials and others to help establish Gurugram’s very first state-of-the-art COVID-19 testing facility. AMD and our employees helped provide diagnostics and imaging equipment to the Victoria Government Hospital in Bengaluru and remote monitoring machines to the Government General and Chest Hospital in Hyderabad.
When we saw a spike of the pandemic in early 2021, AMD employees from 25 locations worldwide donated to nonprofit organizations in India aiding community kitchens, sensitization drives, education initiatives and distribution of PPE kits. Additionally, our local workforce established rapid communications processes at AMD India, to help one another with real-time needs, which expanded camaraderie at the workplace, in new ways.
Overall, through the pandemic, AMD has donated over USD $2.2 million USD in cash and in-kind to efforts in India ranging from daily dry rations to enabling HPC for COVID-19 research.
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 look at CR through the lens 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.
While we address a wide range of ESG-related issues, based on input 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 Environment Stewardship through our products and operations. In our Supply Chain Responsibility program, we work with suppliers to advance social and environmental conditions for workers around the world. Additionally, we focus on Diversity, Belonging and Inclusion among our employees to continuously advance our company’s accomplishments in innovation and performance. Our approach is grounded in business ethics, security, and transparency.
We also map our priority issues and progress with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We recognize no one company can effectively address these challenges alone, which is why we embrace strategic industry partnerships and cross-sectoral collaborations to help advance technological solutions to issues facing our industry and society at large.
Globally, we are seeing ambitious goals being set up by companies to reduce their environmental footprint. What is AMD doing in this direction?
We recognize that our Environmental Stewardship ambitions must go beyond slowing growth in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We want to help reduce absolute emissions across industries and the associated negative ecosystem impacts. That is why AMD is charting a bold path to advance energy efficiency for accelerated computing applications. From 2020 to 2025, we are working to achieve a 30x increase in energy efficiency for AMD processors and accelerators powering servers for artificial intelligence training and HPC.
We have also set a science-based GHG emissions reduction goal for our operations and are working with suppliers to increase the efficient use of resources and renewable energy. From 2020 to 2030, we are aiming for a 50 percent reduction in absolute GHG emissions from AMD operations. We also aim for 100 percent of our manufacturing suppliers to have public emissions reduction goals and 80 percent of them to source renewable energy by 2025.
What is AMD’s approach to Diversity & Inclusion?
At AMD, we embrace innovators from diverse backgrounds to help us create technological solutions for some of the world’s toughest challenges. Our inclusion initiatives foster a work environment that enables all employees to participate and thrive, which in turn creates a sense of community and purpose. We call this “belonging”.
We are committed to growing Diversity, Belonging and Inclusion (DB&I) in our workforce to recognize different viewpoints and experiences, challenge the status quo when needed, and drive innovation and business performance. We have set a goal for 70 percent of our employees to participate in AMD Employee Resource Groups or other AMD inclusion initiatives by 2025. We are committed to increasing the global percentage of female hires 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 multiple questions on how our culture and processes support our commitment to DB&I. The responses to those questions and the overall index score in the top 10 percent of global companies within the tech industry. In 2020, we were recognized by the Best Places to Work for LGBTQ Equality, the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index and Forbes most Just U.S. Companies.
