In the first half of 2026 the market began to price a gap it had ignored for a decade. On 15 April, Aon expanded its Data Center Lifecycle Insurance Program out of Dublin to as much as £2.6bn ($3.5bn, €3.0bn) in capacity. At the centre of the product sits cover for delay in start-up, the stretch between a finished asset and its first earning day. Six weeks later Autodesk paid £2.7bn ($3.6bn, €3.2bn) for MaintainX and stood up an operations division the same day. Underwriters and acquirers were pricing the same risk: the distance between built and operational.
What none of them had done was size the build heading into it. We track about 22 GW of announced artificial-intelligence and data-centre capacity under construction worldwide. Half of it sits in just five mega-campuses, two of them Meta's, led by the 5 GW Hyperion site in Louisiana. Every one of those sites must cross the same handover gap, and no one has priced what the gap will cost.
One finished 60 MW facility loses £11.2m ($14.9m, €13.1m) a month while it waits in commissioning, on the industry's own figures. Across a build this large and this concentrated, the exposure runs into the billions. What that means for anyone building, financing or regulating it is the rest of this analysis.
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