Data centres have quietly turned into one of the heaviest capital commitments in the global economy, and the insurance market is being asked to keep up. Aon has responded by expanding the capacity of its Data Center Lifecycle Insurance Program, or DCLP, to US$5bn — a level intended to match the scale of the AI and cloud infrastructure now being planned and built.

The broker frames the increase as more than a bigger number. The programme is designed to follow an asset from groundbreaking through to years of operation, combining higher limits with advisory work that sits alongside the policy rather than behind it.

What the expanded programme actually covers

The additional capacity applies across both phases of the lifecycle — the construction period and the operating years that follow — rather than being concentrated at one end.

Up to US$5bn is available across Construction All Risks, Delay in Start-Up, and Property Damage and Business Interruption lines, placed through a panel of A-rated insurers spanning Lloyd's and company markets, with further facilities layered alongside.

The surrounding covers have widened too. Third-party liability reaches up to US$200m outside the United States and US$100m within it, while cyber and technology errors and omissions protection extends to US$400m. Project cargo cover runs to US$500m, and up to US$1bn of terrorism protection is available through facilities Aon already operates.

Pulling risk work forward in the build cycle

Alongside the capacity increase, Aon is extending its Reliable by Design framework into digital infrastructure — an attempt to shift risk thinking earlier, before concrete is poured.

The idea is to fold insurance structuring, engineering judgement and risk intelligence into the development process itself, so weaknesses are identified and priced while they can still be designed out rather than claimed on. Once a facility is energised and carrying live workloads, the options for fixing a structural or resilience problem narrow considerably.

Supporting that work is a set of advisory services delivered through Aon Global Risk Consulting, covering climate exposure, environmental risk, physical security, operational resilience and risk engineering. Taken together, it is a move away from treating insurance as a document signed at financial close and towards treating it as a running input into how a site is built and operated.

Digital infrastructure has become one of the economy's most capital-intensive asset classes — and the insurance capacity behind it has to scale accordingly. — The case for a bigger programme

Why AI is reshaping the exposure

Aon links the expansion directly to the surge of investment flowing into AI infrastructure, cloud computing and hyperscale campuses, which is producing projects too large for older programme limits to absorb comfortably.

The change builds on an earlier step that had already lifted DCLP capacity to US$3.5bn while broadening support for facilities in operation. Each increase has tracked the same underlying trend: individual sites getting bigger, portfolios getting denser, and the financial consequences of a delay or an outage climbing with them.

Joe Peiser, chief executive of Risk Capital at Aon, argues that as clients assemble larger and more complex data centre portfolios, they need both greater capacity and solutions that reinforce resilience across the whole life of the asset — and that stretching DCLP to US$5bn is evidence the firm can help clients reach capital, manage exposure and grow with confidence.

What it signals for operators

For developers and operators, the practical read is that risk management is becoming a lifecycle discipline rather than a series of separate transactions.

Construction delay, physical damage, cyber intrusion, cargo loss and business interruption are increasingly being underwritten and advised on as one continuous exposure, because that is how they behave in a facility running critical AI workloads. As projects grow in scale and complexity, the ability to cover that full arc — with advisory capability attached — is turning into a competitive requirement rather than an optional extra.