It is becoming hard to enter a room anywhere in the world and talk about insurance without tripping over data centers, and according to Aon, that reality is now reshaping the global construction market. In the broker's 2026 Global Construction Insurance and Surety Market Report, digital infrastructure has overtaken every other theme. Terence Williams (pictured), head of commercial risk for Asia Pacific at Aon, speaking from Tokyo, said data centers have become the defining driver of construction worldwide, dragging with them a risk profile the insurance industry has rarely had to underwrite at this magnitude.
The scale is the story. Williams said "the size, scale, complexity and length of these builds are unprecedented", with hyperscale campuses - the very largest data centers - now routinely valued at US$30 billion to US$40 billion apiece. In land-scarce markets such as Japan, he noted, developers are weighing 52-story towers to stack servers vertically rather than build the sprawling campuses favored in the United States. For brokers, that means staggering asset values, multi-year construction programs and critical dependencies on semiconductors and raw materials, all compressed into single insured sites.
Williams' first piece of advice is blunt: do not let clients concentrate everything in one place. Rather than insure a single US$30–40 billion campus, he argues, developers should consider building six US$5 billion sites, physically separated and individually fire-protected, to break up the accumulation of value. It is a direct challenge to brokers to model exposure before a foundation is poured.
Catastrophe is the second theme. Williams pointed out that natural-catastrophe risk differs sharply by territory - earthquake in Japan, typhoon in the Philippines, bushfire in Australia - so siting decisions carry very different loss potential. With insurers reporting more frequent secondary perils, he said clients must overlay climate and hazard data on every build. His warning to anyone tempted to discount the weather was characteristically short: "Never bet against the climate."
There is a supply-chain dimension too. Williams noted that the data center surge is consuming available semiconductor capacity, tightening a pinch point brokers will recognize from the chip shortages that hit carmakers – a dependency that can stall even the best-capitalized project.
How the global data center race is shaping up
On geography, Williams is unequivocal. "The US is leading the charge," he said, describing a three-tier global construction market in which America is "light years ahead" on investment in data centers, with Europe and the wider Asia-Pacific region running together in second.
The first tier is data center construction projects and everything that hangs off it. Once a hyperscale facility is committed, he said, developers must immediately solve how to power and cool it, pulling energy, water and grid infrastructure into the same risk picture and making the data center the key ingredient that drives every ancillary build around it. The second tier is defense and critical infrastructure - more hospitals, schools and transport links - where, he noted, "the scale of airport build-out in India is phenomenal." The third is housing, which Williams cast as a perennial driver of every economy.
Asia-Pacific, he stressed, is not yet building at American scale. Where the United States sprawls across vast hyperscale campuses, land-scarce markets in the region are forcing developers to build upward and far more compactly. But he left no doubt where the capital is heading, describing data centers 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" - a measure of how hard insurers and third-party capital are now chasing the sector. Aon has been working to widen that capacity itself, including supporting Factory Mutual (FM) in sourcing an additional US$5 billion of cover for data center risks.
But this building boom is colliding with public resistance that brokers cannot ignore. In the United States, research firm Data Center Watch reported that at least 75 projects worth around US$130 billion were blocked or delayed in the first quarter of 2026 – matching the total for all of 2025 – while New York's legislature passed a one-year construction freeze in June 2026. In the United Kingdom, the government conceded a "serious logical error" in approving a hyperscale data center at Iver, Buckinghamshire, agreeing the consent should be quashed pending a proper environmental review. According to law firm Leigh Day, Thames Water has estimated a single data center can require up to 19 million liters of water a day. And in Australia, the New South Wales government fast-tracked 15 projects worth A$51.9 billion in March 2026 even as the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) forecast data-center power demand to triple by 2030, the Climate Council reported.
For brokers, planning refusals, judicial reviews and moratoriums translate directly into delay, abandonment and business-interruption exposure on projects already carrying enormous insured values. Energy, water, land and community risk now sit inside the construction conversation, not beside it.
Williams framed the whole picture as a generational opportunity for an industry built to absorb complexity. The challenge for brokers is to price concentration, catastrophe and resource risk into these builds before clients commit, and to advise on siting, separation and protection while the design is still on paper. "Data centers are front and center," he said, and the brokers who can turn that scale into a defensible risk strategy will help define the next decade of construction insurance.
