During global insurance and reinsurance broker Marsh’s Q4’25 earnings call, executives across the business highlighted the significant growth opportunity in digital infrastructure, with the rapid global build-out of data centres emerging as a major growth driver.
John Doyle, President and CEO of Marsh, said the firm is excited about the investment opportunity in the digital infrastructure space.
“We expect roughly $3 trillion of investment over the course of the next five years or so, it’s been an area of focus for us for some time,” he said.
Doyle added, “This is a good area for us to be focused on. Our focus, of course, is risk advisory, risk financing, but also capital management, workforce strategies, energy solutions, community engagement, there’s real complexity to the build out of all this infrastructure. So, it is a big opportunity.”
During the call, business leaders across the group discussed how their respective areas are addressing this opportunity and where their focus lies.
Martin South, President and CEO of Marsh Risk, said the business has long been a leader in the technology sector and continues to build on that legacy with a strong presence across the digital infrastructure landscape.
“This includes the fabrication plants, data centres, ancillary services, builders, designers, communities and beyond that, power and energy and supporting operations,” said South.
He noted that an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 data centres are expected to be constructed globally over the next five years, with Marsh already establishing itself as a trusted partner across the ecosystem.
“In 2025 alone, Marsh US has the leading market share of the $205 billion in data centre construction values,” said South. “In Asia, we’re the clear leader, serving six of the largest foundry businesses, the four largest memory IBMS and the largest semiconductor tool manufacturers clients.
“As a trusted risk advisor, our capabilities support clients with builders’ risk of property insurance, ongoing coverage in capital facilitation, we’re supporting clients with asset revenue and contract, what we’re calling ARC lifecycle work, supply chain issues, assessing revenue streams, and reviewing contractual obligations.
“We recognise that insurance capital capacity is a critical factor in supporting growth, and to address this, we’re collaborating with Guy Carpenter and insurers to develop innovative capacity solutions.”
A notable example is Nimbus, Marsh Risk’s large-scale data centre construction insurance facility, which was launched in June 2025 and has just doubled its capacity to $2.7 billion.
“All of this underscores our preeminence in the digital infrastructure space and our commitment to helping clients manage the risk of one of the most dynamic and fast growing sectors globally. We see tremendous possibilities ahead, and are very well positioned to capitalise them,” said South.
Dean Klisura, President and CEO of Guy Carpenter, the reinsurance broking arm, said that data centres represents “the single biggest new business opportunity in 2026” for both cedents and reinsurers.
However, Klisura underlined the critical need to bring more capital into the market: “There’s been estimates of up to $10 billion of new premium entering the market in 2026 because of these opportunities, and the market needs more capacity. No cedants are going to put up billions of dollars of capacity for a single location risk. So, that’s a real issue.
“All of our clients want to write data centres across 10 plus products globally, but they require additional reinsurance protections. Everybody’s concerned with accumulations in portfolios, and we’re solving that right now for our clients.
“I think we need to bring new capital to the market. It’s not going to just be traditional reinsurance capital, the introduction of third-party capital and securitising some of these risks via sidecars and other vehicles is going to be critical, and these are going to have to be deep pocketed investors, given the size of these risks.”
Pat Tomlinson, President and CEO of Mercer, highlighted the limited supply of crucial talent on the data centre infrastructure side. He stressed that employers need to be strategic about their talent to drive these large programmes, noting that these projects require highly specialised skills that are evolving quickly.
Tomlinson stated, “Critical talent is in limited supply, so what we’re doing are things like workforce planning projects, skills assessment and development, a lot of mobility and rewards and healthcare plan designs, all on top of clients’ minds out in the field right now. Martin had mentioned Asia specifically, and I will say that’s an area where there’s heavy, heavy focus on this.
“A couple of examples of some of the things we’re doing for clients on project size is we’re working in the semiconductor industry around large global mobility policy redesigns to enable overseas expansion. If you think about the expansion inside of the data centre ecosystem, and the fact that it’s going much more global, whereas a lot of that was more local before for the Asian companies, they’re really thinking about global mobility and how to get people with the right skills to the projects that they need all over the world.
“Then you also think about the talent change that’s happening and upskilling the current talent. So, we’ve also done some really large technical skills design projects for some of the clients to assess and develop the skills we’ll need in the workforce. And that goes across the ecosystem. It’s not just the data centres themselves, but if you think about the manufacturers of a lot of the supplies that go to building chips, the gasses, the raw materials, we’re seeing projects really across the spectrum there.”
Nick Studer, President and CEO of Marsh Management Consultancy, described the firm’s portfolio as unique in terms of the advisory business across all four of its businesses, and the strength and depth of Marsh Management Consulting.
He explained, “We have the ability to be very integrative, not just in the construction of new data centres, but in the 90% of existing data centres that are needing to become AI enabled. So, we’re working with colleagues across our businesses to help manage that transformation, integrating strategy, risk and execution planning.
“We’re also seeing strong demand in our energy practice around power, around grid strategy, around supply chain resilience, around the navigation of regulation, and one of our biggest capability practices around cost. Most of the cost work we’re doing at the moment is being done to fund investments in growth, and to fund investments in both resilience and in AI and in this whole space. So, we really bring a uniquely integrated set of capabilities.”
