Ken LaRoe has been a champion of renewable energy for decades, and he's founded three banks with a mission of lending based on green-building principles.
He opened Climate First Bank in St. Petersburg, Florida, after reading Paul Hawken's book "Drawdown," which offers a plan to reverse climate change. He opened his first bank, First Green Bank, after reading "Let My People Go Surfing," by the founder and owner of Patagonia, an outdoor clothing company known for prioritizing environmental responsibility.
In spite of his years of work supporting renewable energy, including by providing solar loans, LaRoe is not a part of the anti-data center movement. But he does think data centers could be built and financed in a more thoughtful way.
In an interview, LaRoe shared his nuanced thinking about the AI data center boom, how AI is helping him deal with his recent diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, and why he hates golf.
Large banks have been investing hundreds of millions into building new data centers, but lately they're facing major anti-data center backlash among consumers and politicians. What do you think of all this?
Ken LaRoe: The haters that always take shots at us have asked us, "Do you use AI in your business? Well, you're just contributing to the problem." So my team dug into it really deeply, and they ascertained that at our company, between the bank and the fintech, we write 10,000 AI prompts a month. So it's a lot. We're using it very heavily. But that 10,000 prompts a month equates to 2.25 pounds of carbon emissions. It's infinitesimal.
There's also AI's water usage. [Data centers require the use of water to cool servers and to generate the power they consume]. Water is such a precious resource, and we're dealing with a water shortage in Florida. Do you know what else uses a lot of water? Golf courses. Golf courses consumed 531 billion gallons of water in 2024. U.S. data centers are projected to consume 16 to 33 billion gallons of water by 2028, so 6% of the water used in golf courses. So you want to bitch about water use? Close those freaking things down. It's the stupidest human endeavor on the planet anyway and the most wasteful.
Usage worldwide of AI is going to be a big number, and that leads to the proliferation of data centers. But that reinforces the position we've been taking all along, that we need renewable energy. If it's powered by the sun, who cares how many AI centers we have, except for the land they use? They can provide real economic benefit for a community or a county or a state because they do hire people in the construction and in the operation.
What benefits do you think AI data centers bring?
For every question I have about ALS, I go to ChatGPT or Claude, and I get all the information I need. The other day I told ChatGPT my idea for an invention that could be life-changing for the people affected and asked for help inventing it. It sat there, and the wheel spun, the wheel spun, the wheel spun. It's thinking, thinking, thinking, and then it produces a graphic with all of the component parts, where to buy them, what spec I needed on the parts. It's not perfect, but it's better than I had come up with, thinking about this thing for months. I said, "Well, can you write a patent application for me that I can just plug into the USPTO form?" And it all started thinking, thinking, and generated a five-page patent application in a minute and a half. It's amazing what's come out of AI just for ALS research. So there needs to be that balance of the good that it brings with the understanding that it needs to be done with renewable energy.
Do you think that this AI data center backlash, in which more than 800 active grassroots opposition groups across 49 states have organized to fight data center projects, and New York has set a one-year moratorium on new data centers, will have a lasting impact?
I'm not a pro-development guy, because it's pretty hard to do development that's actually contributory to the human condition, whether it's a 50-lot housing development down the road, or whether it's a giant commercial data center on what used to be a cow pasture. From the perspective of communities fighting back, it's encouraging. Based on the benefits that can come out of AI, is it wrong-headed? I don't know. It will be one of those things that'll take time to unwrap, probably.
What would you like to see? Just a moratorium on certain kinds of energy sources for data centers?
That would probably be the most rational approach. Again, I'm not down for clear-cutting a forest to put in a data center. No how, no way. But what about bulldozing a burned-out shopping center to put in a data center? Why not, if you can power it with clean energy? I know that if you cover the roof with solar, it's not enough. But require them to go into brownfields and cover every square inch with solar to at least embellish the grid. Maybe that's the solution because that's something that the local jurisdiction can enforce.
Do you think banks should take a moment to rethink their data center funding?
Are we experiencing a potential bubble where everybody's jumping in, thinking there's a lot of money to be made? I've had a dozen people approach me and say, "Hey, I'm doing this deal, developing data centers." We've had a bunch of loan requests, and they're all jumping in because they're going to get rich quick. Are they building too much capacity, and three years from now, it will be like the see-through office buildings in Houston after the oil meltdown in the 1980s? Anything that would cause everybody to sit back and actually do their calculations and not bulldoze forests to do it, I'm in favor of.
How have you been feeling?
So far so good. I go to an ALS clinic every month for tests. Nobody can tell you how this disease will progress.
