Lockton has launched a global Data Centres & Digital Infrastructure Practice, a consultative practice designed to help organizations navigate the risks tied to the infrastructure that stores, processes and moves information worldwide.
The specialty practice builds on Lockton's existing experience supporting complex digital infrastructure risks globally, including hyperscale campuses, multi-building developments, phased construction programs, operational portfolios and power-related infrastructure. It combines risk strategy, analytics, engineering insight and market expertise into a single advisory model, serving owners, operators, developers, investors, hyperscalers and technology providers across the full ecosystem. While Aon, Marsh and Willis have each built out their own data centre advisory capabilities in recent years, Lockton is positioning its practice around a fully independent model, one not tied to proprietary capacity or in-house placement targets, which the brokerage argues gives clients more objective advice across the full lifecycle from site selection through operational scale-up.
The team is designed to support clients from project planning, where foundational risk decisions are made, through construction, operational launch, portfolio expansion and ongoing risk management. Solutions will be customized to each client's needs, drawing on a suite of products spanning construction and property risk, errors and omissions, service level agreements, environmental risk, cyber and surety.
Tim Ryan, Lockton's US President, said data centres are at the core of how the modern world operates, and that the risk landscape behind that infrastructure has become increasingly interconnected, capital-intensive and time-sensitive. Organizations need advisors who understand the full lifecycle from planning and site selection through ongoing operations and scale, he said, and Lockton's practice is built to help clients navigate that complexity with confidence.
"The global data centre and digital infrastructure market is evolving at extraordinary speed. Lockton's independent model allows us to bring together global expertise from regions around the world, tailor solutions around each client's business, and deliver advice that extends well beyond traditional insurance placement," Chris Brown (pictured), CEO of Lockton International, said.
The practice will be led by James Nelson in the US and Sam Baker in the UK, working with Lockton leaders globally to drive overall strategy. Nelson brings experience in risk advisory, consulting and insurance, most recently as global head of client engagement at Eldin Risk, having previously held roles at Marsh, Cerberus Capital and Alvarez & Marsal.
Baker has spent 13 years at Lockton advising on insurance solutions for clients worldwide and has led development of the firm's proprietary data centre product offerings in recent years.
Lockton's launch lands amid what several major brokers and insurers described as an unprecedented reshaping of the construction and property insurance market by data centre demand.
Average insured project values in the sector have jumped from roughly US$150 million to US$3 billion over five years, according to Zurich North America, with hyperscalers planning approximately US$710 billion in capital expenditures in 2026 alone and global data centre investment projected to reach US$7 trillion by 2030.
S&P Global Ratings has projected that insurance premiums tied to data centre construction and operations could reach US$10 billion in 2026, calling it a meaningful growth opportunity for insurers even as some individual projects carry insurable values as high as US$30 billion.
That scale is straining capacity. Zurich's Kelly Kinzer has said there simply isn't sufficient insurance capacity in the market to insure the largest projects to their full value, a gap Moody's has linked to instances of investors, including Blackstone, passing on data centre debt opportunities due to insufficient insurance.
Aon's Terence Williams, head of commercial risk for Asia Pacific, has described data centres as "very much the key ingredient in how the insurance market sees its growth aspirations and capital allocation for the next five to ten years," and Aon has been working to widen capacity itself, including supporting Factory Mutual in sourcing an additional US$5 billion of cover for data centre risks after FM more than doubled its own capacity to US$5 billion from US$2 billion.
Where cover cannot be found, residual risk increasingly flows back to sponsors and hyperscalers, often absorbed through captives.
Geography adds further complexity. AM Best has noted that the US now hosts 4,287 data centres as of May 2026, with 64% of capacity under construction sitting outside traditional hubs such as Northern Virginia, pushing projects into markets with greater convective storm, hail and tornado exposure.
Meanwhile, a Swiss Re Institute report found that more than a quarter of US data centre capacity may sit in locations with three or more large-hail days per year, with construction costs at a single location capable of reaching US$20 billion before technology installation.
Lockton's launch positions the brokerage to compete for advisory mandates in a segment Aon's Williams has described as increasingly central to the insurance industry's growth aspirations and capital allocation over the next five to 10 years.
With capacity constraints, catastrophe exposure and compressed construction timelines all converging on a sector attracting hundreds of billions of dollars in annual investment, brokers with dedicated lifecycle expertise, from site selection through phased construction and operational scale-up, are likely to play an increasingly central role in helping clients secure adequate coverage and manage risk in a market still working out how to insure assets at a scale the industry has rarely underwritten before.
