Published: September 24, 2026
By: Catie Owen, Regional Content & Insights Lead (Enriched & Expanded Reporting)
Executive Overview
As the global digital economy accelerates under the weight of generative artificial intelligence, cloud expansion, and edge computing, the infrastructure powering it is growing at an unprecedented velocity. In the United States alone, data centre capacity is projected to nearly triple over the next five to six years, driven by insatiable compute demands and massive enterprise investments. However, this blistering pace of deployment has created unique operational, logistical, and risk-management hurdles—chief among them being the complexities of phased construction.
To address these vulnerabilities, independent insurance brokerage giant Lockton has officially launched its new Builders Risk and Property Program. Developed specifically by the firm’s Data Centres & Digital Infrastructure (DCDI) practice, the specialized program is engineered to bridge the critical coverage gaps that emerge when large-scale data facilities adopt phased development models. By ensuring a seamless transition from the hard-hat environment of construction to the active operational phase, Lockton’s latest offering aims to provide absolute coverage certainty for developers, operators, and owners navigating complex multi-stage rollouts.
Detailed Chronology: The Evolution of Phased Data Centre Risk
The Changing Paradigm of Infrastructure Delivery
Historically, data centre construction followed a linear trajectory: a facility was planned, permitted, built entirely, tested, and finally handed over to operators for tenant deployment. However, the sheer scale and urgency of modern AI-driven workloads have rendered traditional linear development obsolete. Today’s hyperscale and enterprise facilities are almost universally built in phases.
Under this modern paradigm, sections of a data centre—individual data halls, power pods, or cooling yards—frequently go live and begin processing critical IT loads while adjacent halls or floors are still actively under construction. This overlapping timeline introduces a myriad of structural, administrative, and liability challenges.
The Vulnerability Window: Partial Turnovers and Overlapping Safety Protocols
The transition period between active construction and commercial operations represents one of the most perilous windows in a data centre’s lifecycle. During a partial turnover, multiple stakeholders—general contractors, specialized trade subcontractors, facility engineering teams, and enterprise tenant engineers—operate simultaneously within the same physical footprint.
This convergence triggers several distinct risk factors:
- Evolving Safety Protocols: Construction safety mandates focus heavily on heavy machinery, structural integrity, and trade safety. Conversely, operational safety protocols prioritize fire suppression integrity, dust mitigation, uninterrupted power systems (UPS) reliability, and electrostatic discharge (ESD) prevention. When these two frameworks collide, confusion can lead to operational missteps or safety lapses.
- Shifting Responsibilities: As asset ownership and oversight gradually transfer from the construction general contractor to the operational facility management team, accountability can become blurred. In the event of an incident, equipment damage, or business interruption, disputes over whether a fault lies under the builders risk policy or the operational property policy can delay recovery and payout.
- Administrative and Coverage Gaps: Traditional insurance structures often treat construction and operations as binary states. When a facility exists in a liminal "half-built, half-running" state, policy wordings can trigger exclusions or gaps, leaving multi-million-dollar mission-critical equipment exposed to uninsured losses.
Lockton’s new program was crafted precisely to dissolve these grey areas, offering a unified, continuous risk framework that adapts dynamically as a facility’s capacity comes online module by module.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Boom and Its Bottlenecks
The Macroeconomic Scale of the Data Centre Surge
The introduction of Lockton’s program arrives against a backdrop of historic expansion within the digital infrastructure sector. According to comprehensive market data released by Research & Markets, the total capacity of data centres in the United States is expected to triple over the next five to six years. This staggering growth is fueled by several macro trends:
- The Generative AI Gold Rush: Large Language Models (LLMs) and deep learning applications require unprecedented rack densities, often pushing power requirements from traditional 5kW–10kW per rack configurations up to 40kW, 100kW, and beyond.
- Edge and Cloud Convergence: Enterprises across all verticals—from finance and healthcare to automotive and retail—are migrating legacy workloads to hybrid and hyperscale cloud environments.
- Regional Clusters: Major hubs such as Northern Virginia, Dallas, Silicon Valley, Phoenix, and emerging markets in the Midwest and Texas are seeing massive real-estate land grabs and grid-connection queues.
The Supply Chain and Insurance Imperative
With billions of dollars in capital expenditure flowing into these projects, the entire data centre supply chain—from real estate developers and utility providers to equipment manufacturers and insurers—must remain rigidly aligned. Delays in project delivery or catastrophic losses during the construction-to-operations transition can cost stakeholders millions of dollars per day in liquidated damages and lost revenue.
Furthermore, insurers are taking a closer look at these mega-projects. With Lockton’s current client base representing an impressive aggregate of more than 36GW of the global DCDI market, the firm possesses the underwriting leverage and market intelligence necessary to shape modern insurance product development. The Builders Risk and Property Program capitalizes on this market share, turning deep industry data into bespoke risk mitigation strategies.
Official Statements and Industry Insights
Lockton’s leadership emphasizes that a one-size-fits-all approach is no longer viable in the modern digital infrastructure landscape. Every campus has unique architectural nuances, power procurement strategies, and cooling methodologies—whether utilizing traditional chilled water loops, direct-to-chip liquid cooling, or immersion technologies.
"Every data centre project is different, and our role is to guide clients through evolving risks across the asset lifecycle with strategies informed by their development plans, operational goals, and long-term growth objectives," stated James Nelson, US Practice Leader for Data Centres and Digital Infrastructure at Lockton.
Nelson highlighted that the intricacies of modern phased construction demand insurance solutions that move at the speed of technological innovation. By streamlining coverage limits and eliminating boundary disputes between construction and permanent property forms, the brokerage is offering a critical safety net.
"Lockton’s Builders Risk & Property Program is another tool that helps us create tailored solutions at the right tempo for our clients," Nelson concluded.
Industry analysts note that as property underwriters tighten scrutiny over fire risks, supply chain delays, and natural catastrophe exposures (such as water scarcity and grid reliability issues), having an insurance partner that deeply understands the engineering realities of data centres is a distinct competitive advantage for developers seeking project financing.
Future Outlook: What This Means for Developers and Insurers
As the digital infrastructure market charges toward its projected capacity tripling over the coming years, the complexities of building and operating mega-facilities will only intensify. Several key trends are expected to shape the sector moving forward:
- Heightened Scrutiny on Transition Phases: As more facilities adopt modular, phased deployment schedules to capture early tenant revenues, risk engineering will increasingly focus on the physical and operational handoff between contractors and operators. Programs like Lockton’s will likely become the benchmark for risk management in hyperscale developments.
- Parametric and Hybrid Insurance Evolution: Beyond traditional builders risk and property forms, the integration of parametric triggers—which payout automatically based on objective data metrics (such as grid failure duration or environmental temperature spikes)—will increasingly complement programs like Lockton’s, minimizing protracted claims disputes.
- Sustainability and Water/Power Resilience: Future risk programs will need to account not just for physical damage and business interruption, but also for environmental compliance, local water usage restrictions, and power purchase agreement (PPA) contingencies.
Lockton’s proactive deployment of its Builders Risk and Property Program signals a maturing insurance market—one that recognizes that safeguarding the future of the internet requires protecting the physical nuts and bolts of its foundations while they are still being welded into place.
