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Insurers, brokers react to data center boom - Business Insurance Skip to content Register for free Search Search Log In Risk Management Cyber Risks Pricing Trends Mergers & Acquisitions Technology Sponsored Content WSIA RISKWORLD Workers Comp & Safety Workers Comp Cost Control Pain Management Workplace Safety International EMEA Asia-Pacific Latin America People Events BI Intelligence Top 100 Agents & Brokers Best Places to Work 2025 Lists Directories Insurance Pricing BI Stock Index Magazine Current Issue Past Issues Subscribe Women to Watch ALL INsurance Resources Risk Perspectives Sponsored Content Webinars White Papers Risk Management Cyber Risks Pricing Trends Mergers & Acquisitions Technology Sponsored Content WSIA RISKWORLD Workers Comp & Safety Workers Comp Cost Control Pain Management Workplace Safety International EMEA Asia-Pacific Latin America People Events BI Intelligence Top 100 Agents & Brokers Best Places to Work 2025 Lists Directories Insurance Pricing BI Stock Index Magazine Current Issue Past Issues Subscribe Women to Watch ALL INsurance Resources Risk Perspectives Sponsored Content Webinars White Papers Risk Management Cyber Risks Pricing Trends Mergers & Acquisitions Technology Sponsored Content WSIA RISKWORLD Workers Comp & Safety Workers Comp Cost Control Pain Management Workplace Safety International EMEA Asia-Pacific Latin America People Events BI Intelligence Top 100 Agents & Brokers Best Places to Work 2025 Lists Directories Insurance Pricing BI Stock Index Magazine Current Issue Past Issues Subscribe Women to Watch ALL INsurance Resources Risk Perspectives Sponsored Content Webinars White Papers Risk Management Cyber Risks Pricing Trends Mergers & Acquisitions Technology Sponsored Content WSIA RISKWORLD Workers Comp & Safety Workers Comp Cost Control Pain Management Workplace Safety International EMEA Asia-Pacific Latin America People Events BI Intelligence Top 100 Agents & Brokers Best Places to Work 2025 Lists Directories Insurance Pricing BI Stock Index Magazine Current Issue Past Issues Subscribe Women to Watch ALL INsurance Resources Risk Perspectives Sponsored Content Webinars White Papers Insurers, brokers react to data center boom by Matthew Lerner cflaten/Shutterstock.com Agents and Brokers , Construction , Cyber Risks , Emerging Risks , P/C Insurers , Property , Technology Aon , FM Global , Marsh & McLennan , Swiss Re , Willis Towers Watson Apr 24, 2026 The acceleration in data center construction has drawn a robust response from the insurance sector, which is deploying billions in new insurance capacity, consolidating coverage for ease of administration to support ever-larger projects and establishing products and services directly targeting the sector. With the rapidly expanding use of generative artificial intelligence driving the data center construction, insurers and brokers also are working fast to capitalize on a sector where projects can exceed $10 billion in insured values. Data centers have existed for some time but not at the scale of today’s projects, said Ryan Barber, New York-based global head of property for Aon. “What’s really changing now is the adoption of AI and that demand for computing power. So, it’s the size and the scale of data centers that’s now growing exponentially,” he said. While a large data center used to cost about $3 billion to build, “We’re now seeing projects that are being built that have contract values of $25 billion to $40 billion to $50 billion,” Mr. Barber said. Aon in January more than doubled capacity for its data center lifecycle insurance program to $2.5 billion and then added another $1 billion in April. “The growth is phenomenal, and it’s almost like the investment is accelerating,” said Paul Heisel, Frisco, Texas-based vice chief underwriter for FM Intellium, a business vertical FM established last year providing specialized loss-prevention services and coverage to data centers. The insured values are “unprecedented,” he said. The challenge for insurers is to provide sufficient capacity for increasingly larger projects while addressing potential gaps in coverage, he said. “Clients are really driving the need for the seamless coverage, from project cargo insurance to the construction insurance to operational insurance,” Mr. Heisel said. FM in January more than doubled its capacity for data center owners to $5 billion from $2 billion previously after launching Intellium. The pace and size of change has caught clients’ attention, said Paul Woodward, London-based head of casualty, for Marsh Risk international placement. “We’ve listened to some of their concerns around the pace at which they’re having to move, and we want to try and match that with insurance,” he said, which includes aligning clients with lead markets and “fast following capacity” to match the pace of project needs. Marsh recently raised limits at its Nimbus facility, which offers coverage for data centers, to $2.7 billion in response to swelling demand after expanding the facility to the U.S. last year. The brokerage also sought to make the administration of coverage more seamless with a single facility, said Kate Fairhead, London-based senior vice president, U.K. Construction, for Marsh Risk. “We were facing real challenges coming to the end of any given project with this complexity of property insurance and construction insurance, and that made it very complicated in the transfer. It also made it very complicated before construction works even started,” Ms. Fairhead said. “We wanted to wrap it up for them, to give them a place in which they could have a single policy.” In addition to more and larger construction projects, existing data centers are coming online and as they become operational, new exposures begin, said Arooran Sivasubramaniam, Chicago-based head of Zurich Resilience Solutions, U.S. “You go from construction risk in the builders risk policy to worrying about fire protection, water intrusion and risks to an operating facility,” he said. Downtime, for example, due to a power interruption, is also a concern because the costs of an outage are so high. Zurich has recently introduced a data center risk advisory practice and product package. The coverage, data center project guard, provides builders risk, parametric and operational coverage. It offers up to $2 billion for builders risk and additional limits for other exposures. “You need to help your client go from the construction phase into the operational space. It creates a smoother transaction for the client in terms of risk financing and risk management,” said George Haitsch, Philadelphia-based technology, media and telecoms division leader for Willis Towers Watson, who has also seen a surge in demand. “There is dramatic demand from clients,” Mr. Haitsch said. “They need to have appropriate scale to support artificial intelligence, so everyone’s building,” Mr. Haitsch said. Willis formed a group to focus on digital infrastructure at the end of February. According to a recent report from Swiss Re, global insurance premium tied to data centers is expected to more than double to $24.2 billion by 2030. The extensive land and renewable energy requirements of data centers means they are increasingly being constructed in catastrophe-prone areas, the report said. For example, about 40% of data center capacity in the United States could be in “significant-to-very-high tornado-day zones,” the report said. “In a worst-case track scenario, a tropical cyclone passing through a dense market such as Texas could drive loss accumulation, with wind and flooding affecting many campuses and shared infrastructure at the same time,” the report said. 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