GoKawiilAl Gore has spent more than two decades as one of the most recognizable voices in the climate movement, so when he talks about AI, it’s worth paying attention to what he considers truly scary. And it isn’t what has people protesting data centers in the streets.
In an interview with TechCrunch this week alongside Lila Preston, head of growth equity at their investment firm Generation Investment Management, Gore said emissions from AI data centers aren’t what should keep people up at night, despite the mounting opposition over their environmental impacts. What should concern people more, in his view, are the warnings coming from inside the AI industry itself, and he takes them seriously.
It’s not a new position for Gore. This past May, for example, he described AI data centers to another outlet as a “cause for deep concern, but not panic,” and in our conversation this week, his central point about emissions was about scale.
“If you look at the emissions of all of the AI data centers put together, it’s only a fraction of the emissions from uncovered landfills in the world,” he said, adding that a comparable build-out is tied to something that gets far less attention: air conditioning.
It’s a valid observation (and one the AI labs should be using in their discussions with cities and states if they aren’t already). The International Energy Agency estimates that global air conditioning already consumes more electricity annually than the entire European Union, and with ownership still under 15% across the hottest, fastest-growing parts of the world, that demand is expected to triple by 2050, putting far more pressure on the grid than AI data centers over the same period.
Gore isn’t dismissive of concerns about how these data centers are being powered. “It is a matter of deep concern that some of the hyperscalers are jumping into new methane turbines,” he said.
But what worries him about methane turbines isn’t the AI workload driving demand so much as the prospect that building new gas plants to meet that demand locks in decades more of fossil fuel generation.
“I much prefer those that are supplying their energy needs with renewables and batteries,” he continued, saying he expects more companies to move inexorably in that direction simply because renewables are increasingly the cheapest option available.
In fact, Gore thinks the public backlash at planning-commission meetings has less to do with carbon emissions than with anxiety over automation upending society in the not-too-distant future.
“I think that part of the reason for the growing bipartisan opposition to data centers in so many parts of the U.S. is being driven by the underlying concerns about job losses and some of the other threats that experts inside OpenAI and inside Anthropic have been trying to alert the public to,” he said.
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