Why am I not impressed by Intel? I have seen them tweeting left and right about how they have spent their strong arm monopoly blood money to better modern society. I don't buy it.

Perhaps, I do buy the one about spending millions to improve math education, because they could use a few good numbers guys to determine how much to pay the OEM's and retailers to keep AMD off the shelf.

If anyone had bothered to RTFR they would have found out that the total amount of fresh water consumed by intel is running at 7.8bn gallons per annum and the 300bn wild assed guess in the article was way off. Reclaiming and reusing 3bn from 7.8bn seems pretty good to me (although an actual water expert might disagree) but the important point is that the real number is easily found in the report (in the Water Conservation section no less) so throwing in the fictitious 300bn gallons per annum number was just plain laziness .

As far as spending $5m to save "30million kWh of electricity and 750 therms of fossil fuel". The 750 therms is a bit odd - thats about 500 gallons of petrol give or take which isn't exactly going to change the world or Intel's bottom line, perhaps someone missed out a kilo prefix in there.
Spending $5m to save 30 GWh of electricity per annum is a good enough return on its own though - that's a saving of at least $3m per annum so the payback on that investment in purely financial terms would be around 18months.
They also state that previous investments of $23m have resulted in $50m total savings since 2001 so it looks like they have a reasonable record of spending money intelligently when it comes to greenery.

Intel has always been a kick-ass company. Now, it is time to kick their ass (like what EU did). They are “paranoid”, hence it is driving them to be “nice" for a change. This “water saving” figure is a lot of “smoke and mirrors”.

I completely agree. It's been like this for quite some time now from this author - all spice, no reports.

Another big corporation kneeling in front of the climate change altar to try to earn indulgences with the general public. Problem is, less and less people are believing in the globalwarming/climatechange deity with each passing month.

Here is corporate honesty:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/14/now-thats-a-commencement-speech/

@water hog,

I couldn't have said it better!!!!

Sylvie - great job throwing out #'s and not even bothering to put ANYTHING INTO perspective.

Intel saved 3Bil gal of water.... how can I make that seem minisicule... I know I'll just make up a 300Bil # to make it look like 1%.... how about, gasp!, some research into what this cut is and how Intel's water consumption compares (on a normalized output basis) to the rest of the industry or other industries. Nah just making up a # like 300Bil to try to reinforce to readers that they should just assume this is a small % when not even knowing what the actual change is... is a much better fit for the tenor of the article.

As the other reader pointed out you shamelessly covered the volunteer work, and once again fail to put the # of hours of service into perspective.... on a per employee basis how does that compare to Samsung? or Sony? or IBM? or AMD? Nahh... let's just try to be belittle this too.

How about power consumption? How does this compare to using goats to mow the lawn inan unused field (like Google)? How does this compare to Al gore buying carbon offsets so he can fly around in a RIDICULOUSLY environmentally inefficient private jet? How does this compare to other companies. While it would be nice to stick solar panels on the roof to power the factories... they run 24 hours a day, and some are located in rainy areas.

Please Sylvie - do not become another Nick Farrell and just use #'s for the sake of the story while lacking the integrity to put the #'s (or facts) into perspective.

And is it not ironic that Intel's 'for profit' netbook is now price competitive with OLPC $150 laptop... and oh the infrastructure exists to actually build the netbooks while Ego-ponte's OLPC's are built with smiles and puppy's kisses. And is it not also ironic that Ego-ponte kicked Intel off the project when OLPC demanded that Intel not offer chips to COMPETING products or work with anyone on competing designs and Intel refused (is that not irony?)

And it seems no corporate poetry will ever fool you! I love these dinosaurs as well, they're so comitted to making more money.

Here's the answer to "the other 46%". I worked at Intel for a decade and I had colleagues who contributed days and weeks to Habitat houses, or digging wells in Africa, or homeless shelters, et al. Just because we were already committed prior to arrival at Intel, and therefore did not "need" the Intel-organized volunteer structure does not mean half of Intel employees are schlumps. My guess is that this pattern exists at all major companies. Next time, before you extrapolate a snarky conclusion, throw a few more variables into your calculation. Thanks.

And if they are using 300billion, then that's 1bil gallons per day usage of "fresh" water.

Just what are they doing with that water, and is it a significant factor in parched Israel, where the next war is expected to be over water?

I don't know which book on capitalism you've read, Andrew, but you might consider reading one where the text isn't inside speechbubbles.

Well I'm not able to comment about how much other tech companies donate to education and society, the amounts mentioned are pretty small in relation to intel's profits. I'm opposed to giving out handouts/bailouts but it would be nice to see large successful companies do more to benefit society. I know it's not very capitalist but it's true all the same.