During global insurance and reinsurance brokerage Marsh’s 4Q25 earnings call, executives from various business units emphasized the huge growth opportunities in digital infrastructure, with the rapid construction of global data centers becoming a major growth driver.
Marsh President and CEO John Doyle said the company is excited about investment opportunities in the digital infrastructure space.
“We expect about $3 trillion of investment over the next five years or so, and this has been an area of focus for us,” he said.
Doyle added: “It’s a good area for us to focus on. Of course, our focus is on risk advisory, risk financing, but also capital management, workforce strategy, energy solutions, community engagement, all of those infrastructures are really complex to build. So, it’s a huge opportunity.”
During the call, business leaders across the group discussed how their respective areas are seizing this opportunity and where their priorities lie.
Marsh Risk President and CEO Martin South said the company has long been a leader in technology and will continue to build on that legacy with a strong presence in the digital infrastructure space.
“This includes manufacturing plants, data centers, ancillary services, builders, designers, communities and beyond that power and energy and support operations,” Nan said.
He pointed out that it is expected that 2,000 to 3,000 data centers will be built around the world in the next five years, and Marsh has become a trustworthy partner of the entire ecosystem.
“Marsh America will hold a leading market share of $205 billion in data center construction value in 2025 alone,” South said. “In Asia, we are the clear leader, serving six of the largest foundries, four of the largest memory IBMS, and the largest semiconductor toolmaker customers.
“As a trusted risk advisor, our capabilities provide clients with builder property insurance exposure, ongoing capital facilitation coverage, and we support clients with asset income and contracts, what we call ARC lifecycle work, supply chain issues, assessing revenue streams and reviewing contractual obligations.
“We recognize that insurance capital capabilities are a key factor in supporting growth and to address this we are working with Guy Carpenter and insurance companies to develop innovative capability solutions.”
One notable example is Marsh Risk’s large data center construction insurance facility Nimbus, which launched in June 2025 and has just doubled its capacity to $2.7 billion.
“All of this underscores our preeminent position in digital infrastructure and our commitment to helping clients manage risk in one of the world’s most dynamic and fast-growing industries,” said South. “We see tremendous possibilities ahead and are well-positioned to capitalize on them.”
Dean Klisura, president and CEO of reinsurance brokerage Guy Carpenter, said data centers represent “the largest new business opportunity in 2026” for cedants and reinsurers.
However, Klisura highlighted the urgent need to bring more capital into the market: “It is estimated that up to $10 billion in new premiums will come into the market by 2026 as a result of these opportunities, and the market needs more capacity. No cedent is going to provide billions of dollars of capacity for risk in a single location. So, that’s a real problem.”
“All of our clients are looking to build data centers in over 10 products around the world, but they need additional reinsurance protection. Everyone is concerned about portfolio accumulation and we are solving that for our clients now.
“I think we need to bring new capital into the market. It’s not just traditional reinsurance capital, it’s going to be critical to bring in third-party capital and securitize some of these risks through sidecars and other vehicles, and those investors have to be deep-pocketed investors given the scale of these risks.”
Mercer President and CEO Pat Tomlinson highlighted the limited supply of key talent in data center infrastructure. He stressed that employers need to strategically plan talent to drive these large-scale projects, noting that they require highly specialized skills that develop rapidly.
“There’s a limited supply of key talent, so the things we’re doing include workforce planning projects, skills assessment and development, a lot of mobility and incentives, and healthcare plan design, all of which are top of mind for clients in that area right now,” Tomlinson said. “Martin specifically mentioned Asia, which I would say is a very, very area of focus.
“Some examples of what we’re doing for clients in terms of project scale is we’re re-engineering the semiconductor industry around large-scale global mobility policies to enable overseas expansion. If you think about the expansion within the data center ecosystem and the fact that it’s becoming more global, whereas for Asian companies, a lot of it used to be more local, then what they’re really thinking about is global mobility and how to get people with the right skills into the projects that they need around the world.
“Then you also think about the talent changes that are happening and upskilling the talent that’s out there. So we’ve also done some very large technical skills design projects for some clients to assess and develop the skills that we need in the workforce. That touches the entire ecosystem. It’s not just the data center itself, but if you think about the many manufacturers of supplies that are used to build chips, gases, raw materials, we see projects that are really cross-cutting.”
Nick Studer, president and CEO of Marsh Management Consulting, said the firm’s portfolio is unique in terms of its consulting presence across all four businesses and the strength and depth of Marsh Management Consulting’s consulting presence.
He explained: “We have the ability to achieve a high degree of integration, not only in the construction of new data centers, but also in the 90% of existing data centers that need to be AI-enabled. So we are working with colleagues across the business to help manage this transformation, integrating strategy, risk and execution planning.
“We’re also seeing strong demand around power, grid strategy, supply chain resiliency, regulatory navigation and in our energy practice, which is one of our largest capability practices around cost. Most of the cost work we do right now is to fund growth investments, to fund investments in resiliency and artificial intelligence and across that space. So we do bring a unique set of integrated capabilities.”
