Data centres have become a material and long-lasting exposure for the credit, surety and political risk market, and reinsurers often cannot see who sits behind the risk, according to Willis Re.
In its October market view ahead of the January 1 renewals, the reinsurance broker called data centres “the exposure question of the decade”. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have guided to more than $700 billion (all figures in USD) of combined capital spending in 2026. McKinsey puts global data centre investment at around $6.7 trillion by 2030.
The hyperscalers themselves are among the strongest corporate credits in the world. The difficulty is how projects are financed. Many data centres are built through special-purpose vehicles (SPVs). The hyperscaler signs a lease with the SPV, and the SPV borrows to build. When a lender insures that loan, the obligor ceded to reinsurers is the SPV, and a reinsurer may not even know the risk is a data centre.
Aggregation is the next problem. The same few hyperscaler names already sit among the largest buyer exposures in trade credit portfolios, and stand behind the leases on SPV-financed projects. A single project can create exposure across credit,...