Al 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, which he takes more seriously than many other investors. It’s not a new position for Gore, even if it’s something we haven’t discussed with him in our annual conversations, dating back several years. 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.
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, by the way.
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. 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. Naturally, while we had him on the phone, we pressed Gore on the wave of warnings from AI industry leaders that has dominated headlines over the last week.
Though President Trump and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang shared a laugh at their expense on Monday during a conference in Los Angeles (Trump suggested that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s public call to slow the pace of capability gains, quickly seconded by Sam Altman and Elon Musk, was a “hoax”), Gore said he takes the warnings at face value. If that was ever the case, I don’t think it is now,” he said. That said, Gore doesn’t treat AI risk and AI’s climate potential as being in opposition.
He cited a recent study from economist Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics projecting that AI applications aimed at efficiency and waste elimination could drive global emissions down by 6% to 9% per year starting next decade. Unsurprisingly, he suggested that the best thing for humanity would be if the U.S. and China could cooperate specifically on “solving of the climate crisis together and establishing appropriate regulations for the frontier models in AI,” even as he said he doubts the current U.S. administration will be the one to make that happen. If Gore’s focus was risk, Preston’s was where capital is already moving in response.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
