QBE has moved a more than 20-year company veteran from its financial lines business into a newly created global data centres role. Jamie Thompson (pictured) has been named QBE's global director of data centres, a newly created position tasked with pulling underwriting, risk engineering, claims and distribution into a single global proposition for one of the fastest-growing asset classes on the planet.
London-based Thompson takes on the brief having previously led the Financial Lines team for QBE's International Markets, with an earlier stint as director of QBE Canada under his belt.
The numbers behind the appointment are hard to ignore. JLL's 2026 Global Data Center Outlook puts global capacity on course to roughly double from around 103 gigawatts today to close to 200 gigawatts by 2030, with somewhere in the region of $3 trillion of investment needed to get there - split between real estate build-out, debt financing and the GPU and networking spend tenants themselves are pouring in.
That scale is precisely what is rattling underwriters. S&P Global Ratings has flagged hyperscale facilities as an emerging concentration of insurable risk in their own right, estimating that rising demand for data centre insurance could generate around US$10 billion in new premium in 2026 - a figure S&P says is roughly twice the size of the entire global aviation insurance market in annual premium terms.
Asia-Pacific carries a particular version of that exposure. A recent Allianz Commercial analysis found that close to 90% of the region's data centre capacity already sits in areas of chronic heat and drought stress, with fast-growing hubs such as Johor in Malaysia flagged as both high-growth and high-climate-exposure markets. Allianz Commercial's data also identifies typhoon, earthquake and volcanic risk across markets including Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia, further compounding location risk.
There is a structural mismatch feeding into this too. HDI Global research cited by Insurance Business found that data centres across Asia-Pacific are routinely built to standard commercial construction specifications despite functioning as critical infrastructure - leaving structural vulnerabilities that standard property underwriting does not pick up. The specific gaps this creates are already visible in the market: power and cooling failure, which are the most common causes of data centre operational losses, do not trigger physical damage clauses in most standard property policies, and construction-phase risk, operational property risk, business interruption and cyber have typically been placed as separate purchases with separate teams.
In the company announcement, Cécile Fresneau, managing director of QBE's Insurance Division, framed the challenge as one of scale meeting complexity: the sector's size, its power and redundancy demands, and the sheer spread of its locations mean it "increasingly needs adapted solutions backed by deep expertise and global reach."
Thompson's own framing points directly to those coverage gaps, pledging to build something that addresses "the complete data lifecycle" rather than treating construction, operational property, business interruption and cyber as separate purchases handled by separate teams. That is consistent with where the wider broking market has been heading.
Willis established a dedicated Asia data centre practice late last year, against a regional pipeline GlobalData estimates at around US$160 billion, with Indonesia, the Philippines and India singled out as the next wave of build-out. Aon followed with its own Southeast Asia data centre and real estate leadership hire earlier this year, explicitly built around the idea that power availability, supply chain exposure, regulatory change, cyber and service continuity all need to sit under one roof rather than being underwritten in silos.
For brokers placing data centre risk into Asia-Pacific programmes, the appointment itself does not change anything immediately. QBE has not announced new capacity, new limits or a specific product launch alongside the role creation. What has been confirmed is a single global role covering underwriting, risk engineering, claims and distribution for the class - work that has previously sat across separate teams within the same carrier.
Whether that translates into broker-facing product or capacity changes has not yet been disclosed by QBE. Brokers with data centre risk in the region should watch for follow-up announcements on specific coverage or capacity before treating this as more than an organisational change - though the direction of travel, both at QBE and across the market more broadly, is clearly toward integrated, class-specific propositions for a risk that standard commercial property wordings were not built to address.
