Asia-Pacific’s data centre sector is one of the fastest-growing asset classes in the region. The market was valued at approximately US$78.26 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach US$151.14 billion by 2030, at a compound annual rate of 14.07%, according to market research firm NextMSC. But a report published August 5 by HDI Global’s risk consulting unit raises a question with direct consequences for every broker with a technology or commercial property client in the region: are those assets being insured for what they actually are, or for what they look like on paper? The answer, two converging bodies of evidence suggest, is frequently the latter.
The HDI Global report, authored by Johanna Rohrer, risk analyst for natural hazards and climate risks, and Gareth Hopkins, risk engineer, identifies four factors shaping data centre loss exposure across Asia-Pacific: micro-location risk assessment, resource availability, construction standards, and operational preparedness. The construction finding has the most direct implications for brokers. The report states that data centres across the region are frequently designed as standard commercial buildings, despite carrying a critical infrastructure risk profile. Structural vulnerabilities it identifies include large open compartments, flat slab areas, and drainage features – such as internal downpipes and valley gutters – that can fail under extreme rainfall. These are commonplace in commercial construction across Asia-Pacific and are not routinely addressed in standard property underwriting assessments.
That gap is compounded by a problem the Swiss Re Institute independently identified in its sigma insights report published March 2026. The Swiss Re Institute noted that large data centres are sometimes presented to insurers through separate programmes – covering buildings, equipment, and power plants independently – making it difficult for risk carriers to track overall exposure and allowing a single loss event to potentially impact several insurance programmes simultaneously. Taken together, these observations point to a structural mismatch between how data centres are assessed and what they actually represent as insured risks.
The cost consequences of underassessing data centre exposure are measurable. According to New Relic’s 2025 Observability Forecast, businesses across Southeast Asia face median annual costs of up to US$165.5 million from high-impact IT outages – more than double the global median of US$76 million – with per-hour costs ranging between US$1 million and US$3 million across Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
Global insurance premiums tied to data centres are expected to rise to US$24.2 billion by 2030, up from US$10.6 billion, according to the Swiss Re Institute – a figure that reflects the scale of demand, not adequacy of coverage. The Swiss Re Institute noted that once GPUs, tenants, and services are in place, both value and operational complexity increase, making business interruption, loss of rent, and service interruption critical exposure lines. Business interruption limits calibrated against commercial office benchmarks are unlikely to reflect that exposure.
The collision between climate hazard and data centre vulnerability is already producing documented outcomes in the region. The Philippines ranked first in the WorldRiskIndex 2025, reflecting exposure to earthquakes, intensifying typhoons, floods, and sea-level rise. A World Bank report warned that floods, heat, and drought are driving longer and costlier outages worldwide, with onsite power failures and cooling system breakdowns – driven by typhoon-induced grid disruptions and extreme heat – among the primary identified causes.
The HDI Global report cites Tokyo as its central case study. According to the insurer’s HDI ARGOS 4.0 risk tool, the city faces a multi-hazard environment that includes earthquake exposure, typhoon wind speeds of up to 200 km/h, and multifaceted flooding risks, with climate projections pointing to further intensification. The report also notes that climate modelling projects more than 200 extreme hot days – above 35°C – in Mumbai and Singapore for the period 2081 to 2100, placing sustained pressure on cooling systems with direct service outage implications.
Power remains the leading cause of impactful data centre outages globally, according to Uptime Institute’s 2025 Annual Outage Analysis. The report identified power issues as the most common cause of serious and severe data centre outages, while noting that IT and network-related outages are increasing. The HDI Global report adds that electricity supply stability across Asia-Pacific faces additional pressure from lightning strike risk, localised flooding, and storm exposure – each intensifying across major markets.
The risk environment is also shifting on the compliance side. Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) issued advisory guidelines in February 2025 addressing resilience and security requirements for data centre operators across three categories: infrastructure risk, governance risk, and cyber risk. Legal advisers have characterised those guidelines as a likely precursor to Singapore’s forthcoming Digital Infrastructure Act (DIA), advising operators to implement the recommended practices now to stay ahead of future mandatory compliance requirements. As resilience standards move from advisory to statutory across Asia-Pacific markets, the distance between an operator’s actual risk posture and regulatory compliance becomes a live factor in underwriting terms and, in the event of a loss, claims outcomes.
The HDI Global report’s four-factor framework maps onto questions brokers should be testing before their clients’ next renewal. Has the data centre’s construction specification been documented and provided to underwriters? Has a site-specific natural hazard assessment been conducted, or has the site been reviewed only as a commercial property? Are business interruption limits set against actual data centre recovery timelines rather than generic commercial benchmarks? And critically – is the total insured programme structured so that a single event cannot silently breach multiple policy limits without any one insurer seeing the full accumulation?
Data centre construction costs across Asia-Pacific rose an average of 10% year-on-year in 2025, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s Data Centre Construction Cost Guide 2026 – meaning replacement values are moving targets requiring active review at every renewal cycle. In a market projected to double in size by 2030, the volume of inadequately assessed risk is scaling alongside the opportunity. The central finding of the HDI Global report – that standard approaches to site selection, construction, and operation are increasingly insufficient in Asia-Pacific – applies with equal force to standard approaches to coverage placement.
