Speaking alongside Lila Preston, head of growth equity at their investment firm Generation Investment Management, Gore said the scale of data center emissions is smaller than often assumed. He compared all AI data center emissions combined to a fraction of emissions from uncovered landfills worldwide, and said a comparable build-out is tied to air conditioning, which receives far less attention. This past May, he described AI data centers to another outlet as a “cause for deep concern, but not panic.”
The International Energy Agency estimates that global air conditioning already consumes more electricity annually than the entire European Union. 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 is not dismissive of how data centers are powered. He called it a matter of deep concern that some hyperscalers are jumping into new methane turbines, but his worry is less the AI workload than the prospect that building new gas plants to meet that demand locks in decades more of fossil fuel generation. He said he much prefers companies that supply their energy needs with renewables and batteries, and expects more to move inexorably in that direction because renewables are increasingly the cheapest option available.
He argued that 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.
Gore also addressed the wave of warnings from AI industry leaders that dominated headlines over the last week. 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. “I think we went through a phase where some cynically suspected that the apocalyptic warnings were some kind of bizarre marketing strategy. If that was ever the case, I don’t think it is now,” he said. “I do think that Dario Amodei is very sincere, and I think that Sam Altman and Elon Musk were sincere in seconding [Amodei’s] warning of a few days ago.”
He invoked Maya Angelou’s well-known line: “When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.” Part of what changed his calculus, he said, is recent, concrete behavior from AI systems themselves, pointing to “the recent example of models escaping confinement, collaborating secretly, covering their tracks, engaging in deceptive behavior,” and noting that Anthropic has said it stopped instances of Claude being used to help develop biological weapons in different countries.
Gore does not 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.
Preston focused on where capital is already moving in response. She pointed to several fronts where the AI build-out itself is generating investable opportunities, not just consuming energy. The firm is focused on opportunities to decouple compute from energy intensity at every layer of the stack, from the power supply down to green cement and green steel used in construction, storage optimization software, and database design. It is also focused on grid resilience and flexibility as the mix of power sources grows more complex. Generation has invested in Volue, a European company helping utilities pull more renewables into the grid, and Gridware, which places sensors on utility poles to monitor and help protect the grid from wildfire risk.
Gore tied the AI moment to a broader argument made in Generation’s 10th annual Sustainability Trends Report. This year marks the second time in four years the world has been “brutally reminded” that fossil fuels are a volatile source of energy, first with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and now with the disruption to the Strait of Hormuz. Unlike past years, when his exasperation with the pace of the clean energy transition was obvious, he does not see these events as a setback but instead as reasons for countries to embrace it at long last.
Globally, clean energy investment now runs at roughly twice the level of fossil fuel investment, Gore noted. Of all new electricity generation capacity added worldwide last year, 86% came from renewables, and in the U.S. specifically that figure was even higher, at 91%, “in spite of Donald Trump’s best efforts to slow it down,” he said. China received high marks from Gore, who applauded Beijing for wanting to be measured on emissions reductions rather than improvements in carbon intensity.
Asked what has changed more than he expected a decade into publishing the report, Gore immediately pointed to solar power. “For me personally, the scope and scale of the solar revolution is the breakout star of the sustainability transition,” he said. He observed that it is at, or near, the cost floor for new electricity generation right now, roughly tied with wind and meaningfully cheaper than gas, coal, or nuclear. He closed with a line from a friend in Tennessee: “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 with a chuckle. “The joke makes itself.”