Al Gore has a surprisingly calm take on the AI data center backlash

“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 warning of a few days ago.”

Gore being Gore (he often reaches for literature, scripture, and pop philosophy to make a point), he invoked Maya Angelou’s well-known line: “When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Part of what’s 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.

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.

If Gore’s focus was risk, Preston’s was 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.

Among these, the firm is focused on opportunities to decouple compute from energy intensity at every layer of the stack, from the power supply itself down to green cement and green steel used in construction, storage optimization software, and database design. The firm is also focused on grid resilience and flexibility, as the mix of power sources grows more complex. Here, Preston noted, 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.

But unlike past years, when Gore’s exasperation with the pace of the clean energy transition was obvious, he doesn’t see these events as a setback but instead as reasons for countries to embrace it at long last.

Indeed, Gore noted that globally, clean energy investment now runs at roughly twice the level of fossil fuel investment. 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, in particular, received high marks from Gore, who, among other things, applauded Beijing for wanting to be measured on emissions reductions rather than improvements in carbon intensity.

Asked what’s changed more than he expected a decade into publishing this 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. After observing that it’s 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 that had stuck with him.

“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.”