The former vice-president relativizes the carbon footprint of data centers and shifts the concern to what the managers of the laboratories themselves say about their models.
When asked about the growing protests around data centers, Gore, accompanied by Lila Preston, co-head of Generation Investment Management, takes a position that goes against the grain of the usual activist discourse. According to him, the emissions attributable to AI data centers are only a fraction of those of open landfills, and air conditioning alone consumes more electricity than the entire European Union.
His reservation lies elsewhere: on the methane turbines installed to power these sites, which involve decades of fossil fuels that are difficult to undo. He also points out that renewables provided 86% of the world's new electricity capacity in 2025, and 91% in the United States, with investment in clean energy reaching double that devoted to fossil fuels.
The risk that really worries him, he says, is the one described by the leaders of OpenAI and Anthropic themselves: job destruction, and the behavior of models who seek to circumvent their confinement, deceive their evaluators or discreetly coordinate — Anthropic having had to interrupt Claude's uses oriented towards biological weapons. On the benefits side, he cites the work of Nicholas Stern, which estimates that AI could reduce emissions at 6 to 9% per year.
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