For those who may not be familiar with Aon, how would you describe your role in this ecosystem?
As a risk advisor and risk financing broker, Aon’s role is to connect decisions that are often made in isolation — design, risk, insurance and capital — and help leaders understand how those choices interact across the full lifecycle. We work with clients early to translate engineering and operational decisions into structures that insurers, reinsurers, lenders and capital markets can support at scale. The outcome isn’t just insurance placement; it’s a risk aligned capital stack that remains resilient as assets grow.
Data centres have moved from niche real estate assets to critical global infrastructure. From your perspective, what’s fundamentally changed?
The biggest shift isn’t demand — it’s magnitude and consequence. Data centres now underpin AI, cloud platforms, financial systems, healthcare and government services. When something goes wrong, the impact is no longer local or temporary.
At the same time, we’re seeing unprecedented concentration of capital, technology and dependency inside single campuses. That combination means decisions made very early — around location, power, layout and phasing – now have far reaching implications for financing, resilience and long term viability.
Many readers may not think about “risk” until a project is operating. Why is that no longer sufficient?
Because by the time a facility is operating, most of the risk profile has already been locked in. Risk in digital infrastructure is shaped upstream — during design and development — not at the point insurance is placed. If you wait until later, your options narrow. Insurers may limit capacity, lenders may question recovery assumptions and inadequate insurance may limit cost-efficient financing, and operators may inherit fragility that’s expensive or impossible to unwind.
Addressing risk early isn’t about slowing projects down. It’s about preserving flexibility and confidence as assets scale.
Aon uses the phrase Reliable by Design. What does that mean in practice?
It’s about treating reliability as a designed outcome rather than an operational aspiration or an insurance result. Reliable by Design asks a simple but demanding question: Has this asset been designed to remain viable — with lenders, insurers, customers and regulators — when something goes wrong? That shifts the focus from theoretical protection to real world performance under stress: severity, recovery time and capital durability.
For non insurance executives, what really drives confidence from lenders and investors today?
Recovery certainty. Capital providers are less concerned with whether a loss might happen than with what happens after it does. How severe could it be? How long would recovery take? Can cash flow continue? Insurance, contracts and design all need to align with those assumptions. Bankability isn’t negotiated at the finish line — it’s designed into the asset from day one. There’s a saying: “if it’s not insurable, it’s not investable.”
Where do companies most commonly underestimate risk?
Transition. The period between construction and stable operations is consistently the least understood and least governed. Systems are live, redundancy may be incomplete, and tolerance for disruption is low. Many of the most disruptive events occur during commissioning, not steady state operations. Yet responsibility and insurance coverage are often blurred at exactly this moment. If transition isn’t deliberately designed, incidents that should be manageable can escalate into material loss.
You’ve recently published The New Risk Playbook for Digital Infrastructure. Who should read it?
Anyone involved in developing, financing or governing digital infrastructure – even if risk or insurance isn’t their day job. The playbook is designed to help leadership teams make trade offs explicit and understand how early decisions shape bankability, insurability and resilience over time. Digital infrastructure is where this future arrived first, but the lessons apply far beyond data centres.
And what differentiates the winners in the next decade?
The assets that endure won’t just be the biggest or the fastest. They’ll be the ones designed to perform credibly under stress — operationally, financially and reputationally. In a volatile world, reliability is no longer optional. It’s the price of participation.
Click here to download The New Risk Playbook for Digital Infrastructure.
