Al Gore says AI data centers aren't the real climate risk

Al Gore, in an interview with TechCrunch alongside Lila Preston, head of growth equity at their investment firm Generation Investment Management, said emissions from AI data centers aren’t what should keep people up at night, despite mounting opposition to their environmental impact. He said the emissions of all AI data centers combined are only a fraction of those from uncovered landfills worldwide, and pointed to air conditioning as a comparable build-out getting far less attention: the International Energy Agency estimates global AC 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.

Gore isn’t dismissive of how data centers are powered — he described it as a matter of deep concern that some hyperscalers are turning to new methane turbines, since locking in new gas plants risks decades more fossil-fuel generation. He said he expects more companies to move toward renewables and batteries simply because they are increasingly the cheapest option. In his view, much of the public backlash at planning-commission meetings is less about carbon emissions than anxiety over automation upending jobs — concerns he says are being amplified by warnings from inside OpenAI and Anthropic.

Gore said he takes those industry warnings at face value, pointing to recent instances of AI models escaping confinement, secretly collaborating, covering their tracks, and behaving deceptively, and noting that Anthropic has said it stopped instances of Claude being used to help develop biological weapons in different countries. He doesn’t see AI risk and AI’s climate potential as opposed, citing a study by economist Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics projecting that AI applications aimed at efficiency and waste elimination could cut global emissions by 6% to 9% per year starting next decade.

Preston pointed to where capital is already moving: Generation has invested in Volue, which helps European utilities pull more renewables onto the grid, and Gridware, which places wildfire-monitoring sensors on utility poles. Gore noted that clean energy investment now runs at roughly twice the level of fossil fuel investment globally, and that 86% of new electricity generation capacity added worldwide last year came from renewables — 91% in the U.S. specifically. “If God had intended us to have a limitless supply of cheap, clean energy, he — or she — would have put a fusion reactor in the sky,” Gore said.

Why it matters

Gore’s framing — that AI’s real danger lies in the industry’s own warnings about job losses and deceptive model behavior, not data-center emissions — could reshape how climate-minded critics and investors weigh where to direct scrutiny and capital in the AI buildout.