The US leads the world with 4,184 data centers, and global data center spending is projected to reach $7 trillion by 2030. AI workloads are pushing builds to become denser, more power-dependent, and far costlier to insure. Jeff Bellmont, SVP at Intact Insurance, explains why coordinated expertise across property, cyber, energy, and business interruption coverage separates capable partners from the rest in this specialty segment.
Data center insurance sits at the intersection of property, cyber, energy, and business interruption risk, with each phase of a facility's life cycle carrying its own distinct exposure profile. Jeff Bellmont, SVP at Intact Insurance, spoke with Insurance Business about what makes this segment uniquely demanding. "Those built for AI workloads are meaningfully more dense than the data centers we've seen over the last decade. And with that, they require more power, more cooling, and more connectivity. From an insurance perspective, this all adds to the complexity, both in terms of the items that you're insuring inside and also the risk that comes with possible business interruption." Coverage gaps between construction and operational phases add another layer that insurers must actively manage.
Data center construction costs surged sharply in 2025. Average project costs rose 70 percent that year, reaching $633 million per project and $1,033 per square foot, according to ConstructConnect. Construction starts hit $77.7 billion in 2025, a 190 percent year-over-year increase, with Q4 alone accounting for $44.4 billion. Even mid-market builds now cost between $500 million and $2 billion, per McKinsey. Private-sector spending climbed from $1.8 billion in 2014 to $41.1 billion in 2025. Bellmont notes: "It's all changing quickly. And while it's easy to focus on the big $20 billion data centers, there's also a lot of change in the more 'average-sized' data-center builds, as well as existing data centers, that the industry needs to be aware of."
AI-purposed facilities operate at a fundamentally different scale and density than conventional data centers, demanding more power, more cooling, and more connectivity, all of which compound underwriting complexity. Bellmont is direct about the challenge: "The unique demands and design specs of AI-purposed data centers mean the risks are different in some ways, but the way we're assessing them isn't changing as dramatically as the scale those risks are growing. It's about pulling in experts from [varying] backgrounds too, because the complexity of what they're building is new to a lot of underwriters." Intact has underwritten this segment within its Technology group for years, drawing on risk engineers, technology experts, and power and renewable-energy professionals.
Coverage gaps between a data center's construction and operational phases are among the most significant exposure points in the market. The risk profile shifts once internal contents come into play, and policies written across multiple jurisdictions, including London, the US, and Canada, make coordination harder still. "You could have holes in the coverage as you're going from one phase to the next; you could have holes in the coverage when you're insuring one part but not the other," Bellmont warns. His firm's position is to understand the full life cycle without necessarily insuring every component. "Our view is that we don't necessarily have to insure the full life cycle, but we do have to understand all parts of that cycle in order to help brokers and customers," Bellmont explains.
Business interruption is one of the most consequential exposures in data center insurance. Occupancy rates are projected to peak above 95 percent in late 2026, up from around 85 percent in 2023, according to Goldman Sachs Research. Even a brief outage carries severe financial consequences. "With data centers, just a few minutes of downtime is a massive problem," says Bellmont. The exposure spans both property and cyber vectors at once. Bellmont draws a practical analogy: "Take, for example, a dairy manufacturer. You'd hope they'd have another plant where they can ship the milk and turn it into cheese if something goes wrong, otherwise they'll have a huge business-interruption loss. The concepts are the same, there needs to be a focus on downtime and ensuring operations are instantly transferred to somewhere else in the event of different risk scenarios."
As large data center projects transition from construction to operational status, aggregation risk becomes a defining constraint on market capacity. Six percent of US electricity is already consumed by data centers, and that share continues to grow. Bellmont is candid about the uncertainty: "While insurers have dug deep to find the capacity thus far, there remains an open question as to whether that will continue to be the case as these $20 billion projects transition to operational assets, and aggregation risks become more real." His advice to carriers is to manage it with discipline from the outset. "Consistency is a key theme here -- you have to be very thoughtful upfront so that you're consistent over the next few years -- don't yo-yo on price or on appetite," he adds.
Brokers placing data center insurance need a partner who combines deep underwriting knowledge, engineering capability, and claims responsiveness. Speed matters too, since placements are moving fast and internal disorganization slows everything down. "While the demand is going up, there's also a need for speed -- so our broker partners are trying to get placements done very quickly," Bellmont notes. On claims, he is equally direct: "At Intact, we have our own internal experts who understand the coverages, understand the risks -- they won't just write a check; they dive in to understand it and ask the right questions." Size alone is not the differentiator. "We're not the biggest insurer, but we happen to have expertise in all the places where data-center clients need it," Bellmont says.
Jeff Bellmont: SVP, Intact Insurance; spoke with Insurance Business on data center insurance market trends, AI-driven construction risk, aggregation challenges, and Intact's specialty coverage capabilities across the data center life cycle.