Hitachi Slashes Carbon by 74% Across Global Sites Since 2010 as AI Sustainability Demands Rise

Hitachi is moving to align its rapid AI expansion with deep sustainability commitments, reporting substantial carbon reductions across its global operations while planning to measure and manage the environmental footprint of Gen AI deployments. The company highlights a decade-plus trajectory of decarbonisation and circular economy progress, even as it navigates the energy-intensive realities of growing AI workloads and data-center demand. The 2024 Sustainability Report lays out a comprehensive picture of avoided emissions, design improvements, waste reductions, and water savings, alongside a framework for evaluating the environmental and ethical implications of Gen AI and other digital transformations. This article digests Hitachi’s sustainability achievements, leadership perspectives, the Gen AI challenge, strategic responses, regulatory context, and the role of Hitachi Energy in modernizing power grids, with a forward-looking view on how Hitachi plans to sustain growth in harmony with planetary boundaries.

Hitachi’s Sustainability Achievements: Decarbonisation, Circular Economy, and Resource Efficiency

Hitachi’s 2024 Sustainability Report highlights a robust record of decarbonisation across its factories and offices, with a 74% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions since 2010. This figure reflects long-term, organization-wide efforts to lower the carbon intensity of Hitachi’s sprawling global footprint, spanning manufactured products, installed systems, and corporate sites. The report emphasizes not just the percentage drop but the broader context of emissions trajectories over more than a decade, underscoring that sustained progress has been achieved through a combination of efficiency improvements, energy management, and process innovation. The 74% decline is framed as a tangible indicator that meaningful, enduring changes can be realized even as the company continues to scale its AI-enabled offerings.

In addition to the headline CO2 reduction, Hitachi reports a total of 153 million tonnes of avoided carbon emissions across its operations. This metric captures the emissions that did not occur due to the company’s products, services, process optimizations, and customer applications—representing a broad measure of avoided environmental impact beyond direct operational emissions. The emphasis on avoided emissions signals an understanding that responsibility extends into the lifecycle and application of Hitachi’s solutions, not only the emissions generated within corporate facilities.

The company also points to 198 new Eco-Design products identified, signaling ongoing product development that explicitly reduces environmental impact across the life cycle. Eco-Design recognizes considerations such as energy efficiency, resource conservation, durability, and recyclability, guiding design decisions to minimize environmental footprints while maintaining performance and reliability. By cataloging and pursuing Eco-Design opportunities, Hitachi links product innovation with sustainability outcomes, creating a pipeline of offerings that align with green technology trends and customer demand for lower environmental impact.

A notable operational achievement is that 146 sites—representing 75% of Hitachi’s sites—achieved zero waste to landfill. This milestone reflects comprehensive waste management practices, including reduction, reuse, recycling, and waste-to-energy strategies, to minimize landfill reliance. The zero-waste achievement demonstrates that Hitachi’s facilities can substantially divert waste streams through circular economy approaches, contributing to lower material footprints and better resource stewardship across a diverse geographic footprint.

Water stewardship is also highlighted, with a reported 30% reduction in water use per unit of output. This metric captures efficiency gains in water-intensive processes and facilities, reinforcing Hitachi’s commitment to reducing freshwater withdrawals and optimizing water use in production, data centers, laboratories, and offices. The reported reduction per unit indicates that as output grows, water use efficiency improves, contributing to resilience in water-scarce regions and supporting broader sustainability targets.

Beyond these quantitative metrics, the report underscores the broader strategic emphasis on decarbonisation and the circular economy as central pillars of Hitachi’s environmental program. This suggests that savings and improvements are not isolated Inventions but integrated into the company’s operational playbook, governance structures, and product development roadmaps. The emphasis on a circular economy indicates a shift toward designing products for longer lifecycles, easier maintenance and repair, easier disassembly at end of life, and opportunities to reuse materials and components in subsequent generations of technology.

The sustainability achievements are presented as the cumulative result of internal initiatives at Hitachi’s business sites, signaling that progress is being driven by disciplined execution across functions, from engineering and manufacturing to procurement and facilities management. The report frames these outcomes as proof that sustainability goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) can be met in the fiscal year 2023 context, demonstrating continued momentum under Hitachi’s governance and strategic planning.

Collectively, these achievements underscore a clear narrative: Hitachi is pursuing aggressive decarbonisation and circular economy goals while maintaining a focus on innovation, product design, and site-level operational excellence. The 2024 Sustainability Report frames these outcomes as milestones on a longer journey toward net-zero ambitions and more sustainable business models, even as the company expands its digital and AI-enabled offerings in the market. This section of the report includes not only the metrics themselves but the underlying strategies, governance, and internal initiatives that enabled such progress, highlighting that decarbonisation and circularity are integrated into Hitachi’s corporate DNA rather than treated as standalone programs.

Leadership Perspectives, Strategic Direction, and KPI Achievements

Lorena Dellagiovanna, Hitachi’s Senior Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer, emphasizes that the company has “successfully met most of our sustainability goals and KPIs” for fiscal year 2023. Her remarks frame the achievements as part of a broader, ongoing effort rather than a one-off success. She notes notable progress in the environmental domain, particularly in decarbonisation and the circular economy, attributing gains to a set of internal initiatives that span the company’s operational sites and processes. This leadership perspective underlines the importance of consistent governance, KPI tracking, and accountability across multiple business units and geographies, all of which are essential for sustaining long-term environmental performance.

Dellagiovanna’s assessment reflects a dual focus on emissions reduction and resource efficiency as core dimensions of Hitachi’s environmental strategy. By attributing progress to internal initiatives at business sites, she signals that local execution, site-level ownership, and frontline engagement are central to achieving macro-level sustainability targets. Her emphasis on decarbonisation and the circular economy aligns with Hitachi’s strategic priorities: reducing carbon emissions while reconfiguring material flows and product lifecycles to minimize waste and maximize reuse.

The senior sustainability leader’s comments also highlight an understanding that bringing about meaningful environmental improvements requires a combination of ambition, measurement, and continuous improvement. The report’s emphasis on KPIs—especially those linked to decarbonisation and circularity—suggests that Hitachi is committed to a data-driven approach, with progress tracked across a structured framework of metrics and targets. The framing points to the importance of validating progress against defined benchmarks, ensuring that the sustainability program remains ambitious yet grounded in demonstrable outcomes.

Hitachi’s approach to sustainability is positioned as a holistic program, integrating environmental performance with broader strategic goals. The company’s leadership narrative suggests that environmental outcomes are considered alongside business performance, innovation, and digital transformation. This integrated approach reflects the belief that sustainability can complement and enhance core business value—through improved efficiency, lower risk, enhanced stakeholder trust, and the creation of new market opportunities that emerge from sustainable product design and responsible operations.

Looking at the fiscal year 2023 achievements, Hitachi’s leadership signals confidence in continuing the trajectory of decarbonisation and circular economy progress into the future. The emphasis on internal initiatives at the site level implies that ongoing improvement efforts are embedded in day-to-day operations, with potential for scaling and replication across sites and business units. This perspective reinforces the idea that sustainability is not a separate activity but a core capability that informs product development, manufacturing, supply chain decisions, and customer collaborations.

Keiji Kojima, the former President and CEO of Hitachi, contributed a strategic perspective on Gen AI’s role in digitalisation. He asserted that “With the advent of generative AI, the demand for digitalisation is rapidly increasing,” highlighting the transformative potential of Gen AI to accelerate digitization across sectors. Kojima identifies the need to “identify new growth opportunities that are unlocked by the impact of Gen AI on society and the social issues that emerge from shifts such as climate change and demographics.” This framing positions Gen AI as a catalyst for both opportunity and challenge, with implications that extend beyond technology performance to social and environmental dimensions. In the context of Hitachi, Kojima’s remarks underscore the importance of pursuing digital innovation in a way that aligns with sustainability imperatives and broader societal considerations.

The leadership perspective thus interweaves core sustainability achievements with forward-looking considerations about AI-enabled transformation. It suggests that Hitachi aims to balance rapid digitalization with responsible governance, environmental stewardship, and ethical implications. This balance is expected to drive both business growth and societal benefit, aligning with the company’s broader vision of co-creating value through technology and sustainable practices.

Gen AI Sustainability Challenges: Balancing AI Expansion with Environmental Commitments

As Gen AI adoption accelerates, Hitachi faces mounting pressure to align AI deployment with its environmental commitments. Generative AI promises significant productivity gains by automating routine tasks and enabling human workers to focus on more creative and value-added activities. In Hitachi’s view, this potential productivity uplift can accelerate digital modernization, improve efficiency, and stimulate innovation across multiple domains. However, Gen AI workloads are energy-intensive, requiring substantial computing resources hosted in data centers that draw power from electricity grids. The resulting energy demand translates into increased power consumption and, if not managed carefully, elevated CO2 emissions.

Lorena Dellagiovanna acknowledges this tension: Gen AI can significantly improve work efficiency by redirecting human effort toward more strategic and creative tasks. Yet, she warns that expanding AI usage will lead to higher demand for data centers, which, in turn, increases power consumption and CO2 emissions. This framing reflects Hitachi’s awareness of the paradox between AI-enabled productivity and environmental impact, highlighting the need for a careful, metrics-driven approach to AI deployment. The company’s stance is that the environmental costs and benefits of Gen AI must be analyzed comprehensively, considering both operational efficiencies and the energy footprint of AI infrastructure.

To address these challenges, Hitachi plans to evaluate AI deployment through sustainability metrics. The 2024 Sustainability Report emphasizes an approach that weighs environmental and ethical considerations alongside technological benefits. This involves analyzing the positive impacts—such as productivity gains, innovation in processes, and better decision-making—as well as negative impacts, including energy use, resource consumption, and emissions associated with AI infrastructure. By using sustainability metrics to guide deployment decisions, Hitachi aims to maximize net environmental benefits and minimize adverse effects.

The Gen AI-related sustainability focus is framed within a broader assessment framework that considers planetary boundaries and ethical implications. Planetary boundaries refer to a scientific framework identifying safe operating limits for human activities across nine environmental systems, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and chemical pollution. Hitachi’s approach suggests that Gen AI deployments will be evaluated not only for energy efficiency and emissions but also for their potential effects on planetary health, resource use, and social equity. This holistic view aligns AI strategy with environmental science and ethics, aiming to ensure responsible and sustainable digital transformation.

Keiji Kojima’s reflections on digitalisation and Gen AI further illuminate the strategic direction. He notes that the “advent of generative AI” intensifies digitalisation demand—a dynamic that presents opportunities for growth and value creation while also heightening the need to respond to climate change and demographic shifts. Recognizing these societal implications, Hitachi seeks to identify new growth opportunities unlocked by Gen AI and the social issues that may emerge as technology transforms workforce composition, urban development, and energy systems. The aim is to exploit AI-driven gains while mitigating environmental and social risks, thus aligning AI-enabled growth with sustainability objectives.

Hitachi’s Gen AI strategy also includes strengthening problem-solving capabilities through Lumada, Hitachi’s customer co-creation framework for digital solution development. Lumada integrates data analytics, IoT connectivity, and AI to address specific industry challenges. This platform is positioned as a catalyst for developing solutions that are not only technologically advanced but also aligned with sustainability goals, enabling data-driven decisions that reduce energy use, optimize resource flows, and support circular economy initiatives. By leveraging Lumada, Hitachi seeks to design AI-enabled solutions that create value for customers while reducing environmental footprints, reinforcing the company’s commitment to sustainable digital transformation.

Compliance with evolving sustainability reporting requirements across multiple jurisdictions is another critical element of Hitachi’s Gen AI approach. As AI adoption expands globally, Hitachi recognizes the need to align disclosure practices with international standards and local regulations, ensuring transparency and accountability in environmental and social performance. The integration of Gen AI considerations into reporting frameworks reflects a proactive stance toward governance, risk management, and stakeholder communication—an essential component of sustaining trust while pursuing AI-driven growth.

In sum, Hitachi’s Gen AI strategy seeks to balance the productivity benefits of AI with a disciplined, metrics-based approach to environmental stewardship. By evaluating AI deployment through sustainability metrics, considering planetary boundaries and ethical implications, leveraging Lumada for responsible solution development, and maintaining compliance with regulatory reporting standards, Hitachi aims to harness the transformative potential of Gen AI while upholding its commitments to decarbonisation and circular economy principles. The overarching objective is to realize AI-enabled productivity gains without undermining the company’s long-standing environmental performance and social responsibility.

Hitachi’s Methodology: Sustainability Metrics, Planetary Boundaries, and Co-Creation Platforms

Hitachi’s response to the Gen AI challenge centers on a structured methodology that integrates environmental assessment with business and social considerations. The company explains that it intends to analyze both the positive and negative impacts of Gen AI from multiple perspectives, which include environmental impacts as well as ethical implications. This multi-faceted approach demonstrates a commitment to a well-rounded evaluation that goes beyond energy metrics alone and encompasses broader sustainability dimensions.

A key element of Hitachi’s methodology is the application of planetary boundaries as a framework for evaluating the environmental limits of human activity. The planetary boundaries concept comprises nine environmental systems whose safe operating limits must be preserved to maintain Earth’s stability. By applying this framework to Gen AI, Hitachi aims to identify where AI deployment may push beyond safe thresholds, particularly in terms of climate change, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, land-system change, and other environmental domains. This approach reflects a forward-looking risk management posture, ensuring that AI-driven growth aligns with the planet’s resilience.

To operationalize this assessment, Hitachi has proposed a multi-perspective analysis model that weighs environmental consequences, ethical concerns, and social implications. This structured analysis seeks to balance innovation with responsibility, ensuring that AI evolution does not come at the expense of ecological integrity or social equity. By incorporating these broader considerations, Hitachi positions Gen AI as not only a technological advancement but also a governance and sustainability issue requiring careful oversight.

Lumada, the company’s customer co-creation framework for developing digital solutions, plays a central role in Hitachi’s sustainability-oriented AI strategy. The platform unites data analytics, IoT connectivity, and AI to tackle specific industry challenges—such as energy efficiency, resource optimization, and waste reduction—through collaborative development with customers. Using Lumada, Hitachi intends to co-create solutions that deliver measurable environmental benefits while meeting sector-specific needs. The emphasis on co-creation signals a recognition that sustainable outcomes often emerge from close collaboration between technology providers and end-users, with the customer’s real-world context shaping both design and deployment.

By combining sustainability metrics with a planetary boundaries lens and the collaborative capabilities of Lumada, Hitachi’s approach to Gen AI governance aims to deliver a robust framework for responsible digital transformation. The intent is to maximize productivity and innovation while minimizing negative externalities, such as increased energy demand and resource use. This approach aligns with the broader corporate objective of delivering value through technology that respects environmental limits and supports societal well-being.

Regulatory Landscape and Standards Shaping Hitachi’s Sustainability Reporting

Hitachi recognizes that evolving sustainability reporting requirements across multiple jurisdictions are a significant driver of transparency, accountability, and consistency in disclosures. In particular, two major regulatory developments are highlighted: the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) standards, which establish global baselines for sustainability reporting.

The CSRD mandates detailed environmental and social disclosures for large companies operating in EU markets. The directive expands the scope and depth of reporting, requiring more granular information about governance, risk management, environmental impacts, social factors, and governance practices. Hitachi’s preparation for increased CSRD expectations likely involves strengthening data collection, verification processes, and consistency across jurisdictions to ensure that reporting remains compliant and credible.

The ISSB works to set global baseline standards for sustainability reporting, fostering consistency across different regulatory frameworks. For a multinational like Hitachi, ISSB-based reporting helps harmonize disclosures across markets while supporting comparability for investors, customers, and other stakeholders. The integration of ISSB standards with national or regional requirements enables Hitachi to present a coherent and comprehensive view of its sustainability performance, reducing fragmentation and facilitating benchmarking against global peers.

In addition to focusing on CSRD and ISSB, Hitachi’s sustainability reporting approach emphasizes the broader trend toward standardized, comparable, and decision-useful disclosures. The company positions itself to meet or exceed evolving expectations by prioritizing high-quality data, transparent governance, and clear linkages between environmental performance, social impact, and business strategy. This approach helps Hitachi articulate the business value of its sustainability initiatives, including decarbonisation efforts, circular economy activities, and responsible AI governance.

The regulatory context is not seen as a compliance hurdle alone but as an enabler of better decision-making and risk management. By aligning with CSRD and ISSB standards, Hitachi can demonstrate its commitment to sustainable growth, environmental stewardship, and social responsibility, while also improving investor confidence and stakeholder trust. The company’s emphasis on meeting these standards underscores its strategic intent to mainstream sustainability across the organization and integrate ESG considerations into core business processes, product design, and customer engagements.

Hitachi Energy and Grid Modernization: HVDC, Carbon Neutrality, and Workforce Growth

Hitachi Energy, the group’s power transmission and distribution division, plays a pivotal role in Hitachi’s broader sustainability ambitions through its grid modernization initiatives and clean technology growth. The division aims for carbon neutrality across its own operations by 2030 and a broader value chain carbon neutrality by 2050. These targets reflect a commitment to reducing emissions across the supply chain and ensuring that both internal operations and external partners contribute to climate goals. By setting these explicit timelines, Hitachi Energy aligns its technology deployment with global decarbonisation trajectories.

A cornerstone of Hitachi Energy’s contribution is the deployment of high-voltage direct current (HVDC) technology, which enables efficient long-distance electricity transmission with lower losses than traditional alternating current systems. HVDC’s efficiency and reliability are particularly valuable for integrating renewable energy sources—such as wind and solar—into distant consumption centers, reducing overall system losses and enabling more effective use of renewable resources. The grid-connected HVDC capacity of Hitachi Energy now totals 150 gigawatts, a scale comparable to Japan’s peak electricity demand, illustrating the technology’s potential to transform energy infrastructure and accelerate decarbonisation.

Since 2020, Hitachi Energy has expanded its global footprint with more than 8,000 employees and invested US$3 billion in manufacturing, engineering, and research and development. This investment signals a strong commitment to building capabilities, expanding production capacity, and advancing innovation in grid technologies. The workforce expansion supports growing demand for grid infrastructure as countries transition to renewable energy, reinforcing Hitachi Energy’s role in a future oriented toward sustainable power systems.

Lorena Dellagiovanna notes an overarching strategic shift: the company is “shifting toward using fewer raw materials, water and other resources more efficiently and sustainably.” This statement reflects a broader resource-efficiency agenda across Hitachi’s divisions, including energy-intensive segments like grid technologies. The emphasis on reducing material intensity and improving water efficiency aligns with Hitachi’s decarbonisation and circular economy goals, illustrating how the energy transition and sustainability strategy converge with the company’s product and technology portfolios.

Hitachi Energy’s work in HVDC and grid modernization is positioned as a critical enabler of renewable energy integration and decarbonisation across regions, supporting the transition from fossil-based power systems to low-carbon grids. By delivering scalable, efficient transmission solutions, the division contributes to reduced emissions associated with electricity delivery and enables a higher share of renewables in electricity mixes. The combination of HVDC expertise, manufacturing and R&D investment, and a growing workforce underpins Hitachi’s broader climate strategy and its ability to support customers in achieving their own sustainability objectives.

Operational Achievements and Product Stewardship: Eco-Design, Waste Reduction, and Water Efficiency

Hitachi highlights a set of operational and product-focused achievements that reinforce its commitment to sustainable business practices. The identification of 198 Eco-Design products demonstrates how environmental considerations are embedded in product development, guiding design choices toward lower environmental impacts, better energy efficiency, and longer lifecycles. This facet of Hitachi’s strategy emphasizes that sustainability is not an add-on but a core criterion in product engineering and portfolio planning.

The achievement of 146 sites—representing 75% of the company’s sites—reaching zero waste to landfill stands as a concrete indicator of the effectiveness of Hitachi’s waste management programs. The zero-waste status arises from comprehensive strategies that reduce, reuse, recycle, and recover materials, ensuring that waste streams are minimized and diverted from landfills with systemic processes across production lines, offices, and laboratories. This milestone reflects disciplined operational execution and a commitment to circular economic practices at scale.

Water management is also a priority, with Hitachi reporting a 30% reduction in water use per unit of output. This metric captures improvements in water efficiency across processes and facilities, including manufacturing, data centers, and other operations where water is a critical resource. The reduction signifies that Hitachi has implemented water-saving technologies, process optimizations, and efficient cooling or filtration strategies that lower water consumption while maintaining performance and reliability.

The 153 million tonnes of CO2 avoided emissions and the 74% reduction in direct emissions since 2010 are presented together to demonstrate the broader environmental impact of Hitachi’s activities. The avoided emissions reflect opportunities created by the company’s products, services, and process improvements that prevent emissions in customers’ operations or across life cycles. When combined with decarbonisation metrics within Hitachi’s own footprint, these figures illustrate a comprehensive approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions across both supply chains and end-user applications.

In addition to environmental metrics, the company notes continued progress in governance and reporting as part of its sustainability program. This includes adherence to evolving international standards and the integration of sustainability considerations into corporate strategy and operations. The emphasis on governance and accountability, along with measurable environmental outcomes, supports a coherent approach to sustainability that aligns with investor expectations, customer requirements, and regulatory developments.

From a product perspective, Eco-Design and zero-waste achievements reinforce Hitachi’s commitment to responsible product stewardship. The company’s design methodology prioritizes environmental considerations in the early stages of product development, ensuring that new offerings deliver value while minimizing resource use, emissions, and waste throughout their life cycles. The zero-waste milestone demonstrates a strong culture of waste reduction and circularity across manufacturing operations, which is essential for maintaining sustainable production patterns as the company grows its portfolio and enters new markets.

The Broader Business Context: Energy Transition, Digitalization, and Economic Implications

Hitachi’s sustainability narrative sits at the intersection of energy transition, digitalization, and economic strategy. By accelerating Gen AI and other digital technologies, Hitachi envisions productivity gains and new business models that can be pursued with a disciplined focus on environmental stewardship. The company contends that digital transformation can deliver substantial efficiency improvements across operations, supply chains, and customer solutions, all while staying mindful of energy consumption, water use, material efficiency, and waste.

As AI workloads expand, Hitachi’s framework for evaluating the environmental and ethical implications of Gen AI reflects a careful balancing act. The company acknowledges the need for data centers to support AI capabilities but stresses that deployment decisions must consider both immediate benefits and longer-term environmental costs. The goal is to reconcile the drive for digital growth with the imperative to minimize energy consumption and carbon emissions, crafting a sustainable path that enables both technological progress and planetary health.

Hitachi’s approach also has implications for economic resilience and sustainability leadership. By investing in grid modernization through Hitachi Energy, the company contributes to the reliability and efficiency of electricity systems, enabling higher penetration of renewables and reduced emissions from power generation. This is complemented by product and process innovations that reduce energy demand and material intensity, supporting a more sustainable growth trajectory for Hitachi and its customers.

In addition to environmental outcomes, Hitachi’s sustainability program emphasizes social considerations and governance. The integration of ethics, transparency, and stakeholder engagement into the Gen AI governance model signals a broader commitment to responsible innovation. This includes addressing social issues that arise from technology-driven shifts in demographics, workforce dynamics, and urban development, ensuring that the benefits of digitalization are broadly shared and responsibly managed.

A Vision for the Future: Strategic Roadmap, Compliance, and Continued Innovation

Looking ahead, Hitachi presents a comprehensive roadmap that integrates sustainability with AI-enabled growth, grid modernization, and responsible governance. The company aims to sustain decarbonisation progress while expanding its AI-enabled solutions and maintaining robust environmental performance. This involves continuous improvement in site-level operations, broader integration of Eco-Design practices, and ongoing investment in technologies that improve energy and water efficiency, reduce waste, and minimize the environmental footprint of products and services.

Compliance with CSRD, ISSB, and other emerging standards remains central to Hitachi’s reporting philosophy. By aligning with these frameworks, Hitachi seeks to deliver transparent, high-quality disclosures that support informed decision-making by investors, customers, and regulators. The company’s focus on high-standard reporting reinforces its credibility and demonstrates a long-term commitment to sustainable growth that integrates environmental, social, and governance considerations into core business operations.

The Gen AI governance framework will continue to evolve as AI technologies mature and regulatory expectations become more sophisticated. Hitachi plans to refine its sustainability metrics as AI deployments scale, ensuring that positive productivity gains are balanced by responsible energy and resource use. The Lumada platform will play a pivotal role in co-creating AI-enabled solutions that deliver measurable environmental benefits, enabling customers to realize efficiency gains and sustainable outcomes aligned with Hitachi’s decarbonisation and circular economy objectives.

The company expects that its continued investments in Hitachi Energy, HVDC technology, and grid modernization will strengthen the energy transition by enabling higher shares of renewable energy in electricity systems. This aligns with Hitachi’s overarching climate strategy and supports broader societal benefits through more resilient, efficient, and low-carbon infrastructure. By combining product innovation, operational excellence, and strategic partnerships, Hitachi envisions sustainable growth that contributes to global decarbonisation while generating value for stakeholders.

Conclusion

Hitachi’s 2024 Sustainability Report presents a cohesive and ambitious narrative about decarbonisation, circular economy, and responsible innovation in the era of Gen AI. The 74% CO2 reduction since 2010, alongside 153 million tonnes of avoided emissions and strong progress on Eco-Design, zero waste, and water efficiency, demonstrates a track record of meaningful environmental improvement across the company’s global footprint. Leadership perspectives from Lorena Dellagiovanna reinforce a disciplined, KPI-driven approach to sustainability, while Keiji Kojima’s reflections on Gen AI emphasize the strategic importance of digital transformation that aligns with societal and environmental considerations. The Gen AI sustainability framework—analyzing positive and negative impacts, applying planetary boundaries, leveraging Lumada for co-creation, and maintaining regulatory compliance—positions Hitachi to navigate the opportunities and risks of AI-driven growth with a strong environmental conscience. Hitachi Energy’s HVDC leadership and grid modernization efforts further underscore the company’s commitment to enabling renewable energy integration and reducing emissions on a systemic level, supported by a growing workforce and substantial investment. Collectively, Hitachi presents a comprehensive strategy that seeks to harmonize AI-enabled productivity and digital transformation with sustainable outcomes, leveraging design excellence, waste reduction, water stewardship, and responsible governance to build a resilient, innovative, and environmentally responsible technology giant.