Major lenders face challenges financing novel asset class: data centres

Building the infrastructure for the AI age turns out to be a lot easier than financing it. Major global lenders are discovering that data centers, the physical backbone of every chatbot query and cloud computing workload, present a tangle of risks that existing banking playbooks weren’t designed to handle. US data center-related debt has ballooned to at least $1.3 trillion as of mid-2026. The top 15 lenders alone hold roughly $196 billion in exposure, about 15% of the total, with TD Bank sitting at the front of the line at $26.8 billion. Those numbers would be impressive for a mature asset class. For one that bankers are openly calling “entirely novel,” they’re borderline alarming. The insurance problem nobody planned for The core issue is deceptively simple: you can’t insure what you can’t fully understand. Construction costs for a single mega-project now regularly land between $10 billion and $30 billion. Meta’s Hyperion campus, budgeted at $30 billion, managed to secure only about $4 billion in insurance coverage. That leaves an enormous gap between what these facilities cost and what traditional insurers are willing to backstop. This gap has real consequences at the deal table....