Data-centre tenants now demand $5M a day in late fees, and insurers are inventing new cover for it
What's going on? The AI build-out has a new line item: late fees. The Information reported on 25 October that this spring Mike Mathews, who runs the global digital infrastructure practice at broker MarshDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, had to design a bespoke "delay-in-delivery" policy for a developer whose tenant wanted $1m for every day the first phase of a gigawatt-scale campus was late. Within months, tenants in new deals were asking for $5m or more a day, pointing to even higher estimates of their own lost revenue.
The numbers: According to The Information, Swiss Re expects data-centre insurance premiums to approach $24bn by 2030, and S&P puts 2026 at about $10bn, roughly twice the size of global aviation insurance. Christian Okoye of Occam Edge estimates that a two-month delay on a 1GW shell could cost about $300m in penalties plus lost rent. KKR's Waldemar Szlezak put it bluntly: late penalties "will bankrupt more developers than interest rates ever will". Marsh is Meta's broker on its El Paso project and found more than $5bn of credit protection for one developer's utility commitments. Hut 8's Corpus Christi site has 19 months of delay-in-start-up cover from FM, placed by AonDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. GPU residual value and utility guarantees are emerging as new risks, while Marsh says labour shortages are uninsurable.
Context: Brokers have been scaling up capacity all year. Aon expanded its Data Center Lifecycle Insurance Program to $5bn in July, and Marsh's Nimbus facility, launched in June 2025, has reportedly been raised to $2.7bn. Classic cover has a gap, though. Marsh's own guidance says delay-in-start-up insurance generally pays only when a delay is caused by insured physical damage, so pure schedule slippage, supply-chain problems or a missed grid connection usually fall outside it. That is why the new penalty-specific policies are unusual. Delays are common: Goldman Sachs Research estimated in May that only about 60% of US capacity scheduled for the next year would come online on time.
Why it matters: Penalty and insurance terms show where the risk of the AI build-out actually sits. Hyperscaler and AI-lab tenants are pushing it onto developers, often first-time builders, and their lenders. It lands in the same weekend as Elon Musk and Chamath Palihapitiya warning that debt markets are closing for weaker neoclouds. A developer that misses its power date now faces a daily bill, not just a slower ramp.
What's confirmed and what isn't: The $1m and $5m-a-day figures, the Meta and developer examples and the Szlezak and Okoye quotes come from The Information's reporting with brokers and investors. The underlying leases are private. The Swiss Re and S&P premium figures are forecasts. Aon's programme size and Marsh's coverage guidance are from the companies' own publications.
Sources: The Information / Aon / Marsh / WebProNews
