Shannon O'Brien (pictured) has worked on data centre projects through both their construction and operational phases and what struck her more than the scale of the builds was the speed of the insurers. "What has stood out is how quickly insurer appetite and thinking towards new technology has evolved," said O'Brien, executive director for construction, power and renewables, New Zealand, at Aon. For an industry that rarely rushes, that could be a notable shift and it arrives just as New Zealand positions itself to capture billions of dollars in data centre investment.
In early July 2026, government agency Invest New Zealand gathered about 100 business leaders in Auckland for what it framed as a "call to arms", urging them to help build a new national industry of artificial intelligence (AI) data centres. A report circulated at the event talked up the potential to attract between $25 billion and $40 billion of private investment in data centres, renewables, fibre and transmission over five years. Boston Consulting Group has put the wider opportunity at up to $70 billion in economic activity over a decade. Projects are already moving: Singapore-based Datagrid holds consent for a $2.5 billion "AI factory" near Invercargill, while Amazon Web Services is building an Auckland cluster it has billed as a NZ$7.5 billion investment.
For local brokers, that pipeline is turning a once-niche class into a core growth market. What makes O'Brien's read particularly relevant to brokers is where she points the attention - not at the clients but at the carriers.
Aon captured the trend in its 2026 Global Construction Insurance and Surety Market Report, which found technology-led developments such as data centres are becoming a core driver of complex construction activity in New Zealand, echoing Aon's own analysis of how the data centre boom is rewriting the construction risk playbook. O'Brien said the segment had moved from an emerging area to one the broker now sees far more of. What has changed most, in her view, is the insurers. "Compared to even three years ago, that shift has been much faster than we typically see in the insurance industry," she said.
The evidence splits along the market's two roles. On the carrier side, insurers have expanded their own appetite: commercial property insurer FM more than doubled its data centre limits to US$5 billion through its FM Intellium unit in January 2026, describing it as the largest then available, while Zurich rolled out a dedicated data centre advisory practice and its "data center project guard" package. S&P Global Ratings has estimated up to US$10 billion in new premiums could enter the market in 2026, and ratings agency AM Best has said the evolving data centre landscape now requires insurer innovation.
Brokers have moved just as fast to package that capacity into single, lifecycle facilities - Aon launched its Data Centre Lifecycle Insurance Program (DCLP) in June 2025 and lifted it to US$3.5 billion by April 2026, its second expansion in 2026; Marsh raised limits at its Nimbus facility to US$2.7 billion; and Willis Towers Watson (WTW) launched Digital Infrastructure Protector in April 2026. Those broker facilities exist only because insurers are willing to commit the paper behind them – which is exactly O'Brien's point.
That compressed wave of launches - most of it inside a six-month window - is the tangible version of the acceleration O'Brien describes.
For brokers, her message is that the work starts before a site is chosen. Early engagement is critical, O'Brien said, because decisions on site selection and design carry material insurance implications. In New Zealand, the two exposures she addresses first are natural hazard risk - particularly earthquake and flood - and delay in start-up (DSU) risk, especially on debt-funded projects, with insurers now placing greater weight on catastrophe modelling and DSU underwriting. Energy use feeds directly into insurability as well; while brokers cannot solve the power challenge, she said they can ensure design and financing discussions properly account for how power resilience affects cover, a point reinforced when Aon named a global builders risk lead for data centre construction.
For O'Brien, the pace of the insurance response is the encouraging part. "That is encouraging because it reflects a willingness from insurers to support the infrastructure growth ambitions we have in New Zealand," she said. If Invest New Zealand's numbers land even partly, the brokers who grasp how quickly that appetite is moving and bring clients into the conversation early will help decide how the country's data centre boom gets insured.
