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Al Gore has a surprisingly calm take on the AI data center backlash
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Al Gore has a surprisingly calm take on the AI data center backlash, and the former U.S. vice president wants the public to look past the smokestacks. In an interview with TechCrunch this week alongside Lila Preston, head of growth equity at Generation Investment Management, Gore argued that the emissions tied to AI data centers are not what should keep people awake at night. The real danger, he said, lies in warnings issued by the AI industry's own insiders.
Gore has spent more than two decades as one of the world's most recognizable climate voices, so his decision to downplay data center emissions carries weight. It is also not a new position: in May he described AI data centers as a "cause for deep concern, but not panic." His latest remarks arrive as protests against new hyperscale campuses have spread across U.S. communities, with planning-commission meetings becoming unusually combative.
Gore's central argument is 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 far less scrutinized: air conditioning. The International Energy Agency estimates global cooling already consumes more electricity annually than the entire European Union, and with ownership still below 15% in the hottest, fastest-growing regions, demand is expected to triple by 2050.
Gore is not dismissive of how data centers are powered. "It is a matter of deep concern that some of the hyperscalers are jumping into new methane turbines," he said, warning that building new gas plants locks in decades of fossil fuel generation. He prefers operators that supply their needs with renewables and batteries, and expects more companies to move in that direction because renewables are increasingly the cheapest option available.
The distinction matters for the utilities, grid operators, and city councils now weighing gigawatt-scale interconnection requests. If Gore is right, the fight over data centers is less a carbon accounting problem than a land-use, water, and ratepayer-cost problem. That framing could shift how regulators evaluate proposals and how operators negotiate community benefits agreements.
He suspects the backlash has less to do with emissions than with automation anxiety. "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. Climate advocates counter that new methane turbines still expand fossil infrastructure, whatever the demand driver.
Gore and Preston made the comments in their capacity as leaders of Generation Investment Management, which backs growth-stage companies on sustainability grounds. He predicted an inexorable shift toward renewables plus storage as costs fall, and suggested AI labs would be wise to lead with that comparison in statehouse and city-hall conversations.
The exchange fits a broader pattern in which the loudest warnings about AI now come from inside the field. Gore takes those warnings seriously, which is why he ranks them above the data center debate. His message, essentially: worry about the technology's societal shockwaves, not its smokestacks.
