Al Gore has a surprisingly calm take on the AI data center backlash
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 trying to understand what he considers truly scary compared with what’s disturbing people so much that they are protesting 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 them more seriously than many other investors.
- ▪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 trying to understand what he considers truly scary compared with what’s disturbing people so much
- ▪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
- ▪What should concern people more, in his view, are the warnings coming from inside the AI industry itself, which he takes them more seriously than many other investors.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/16/al-gore-has-a-surprisingly-calm-take-on-the-ai-data-center-backlash/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 16 Sep 2026 23:43:09 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-16T23:43:41.894Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-16T23:43:41.894Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 2LmVL58_YZdr · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
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 trying to understand what he considers truly scary compared with what’s disturbing people so much that they are protesting 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 them more seriously than many other investors.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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