Andrew Putwain: You'll be speaking on infrastructure, real estate, the AI periphery, and the opportunities and risks. Let's break this down. When we discuss areas such as infrastructure and real estate, what megatrends are we seeing, and what are we talking about here?
Liz Gorgoglione: We’re seeing a bifurcation. I remember when we first started looking at data centres, we asked: is this real estate, commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS), or something else entirely? As demand has surged - not only from users, but also from investors - data centres have increasingly developed into an asset class of their own.
That reflects their complexity. A data centre is not simply a real estate asset or a building, nor is it only about the technology inside it. It also depends on the infrastructure that supports it and the broader ecosystem around it. Even within the sector, there are important distinctions between hyperscalers and traditional co-location facilities. Investors need to consider duration, contracted cash flows, and the scarcity of the power required to operate them.
Traditional real estate is generally assessed through contractual lease cash flows. With data centres, the sources of those cash flows can be very different, particularly when GPUs, chips, computing capacity, and related technology are involved. Those distinctions create additional complexity from both an investor and an insurer perspective.
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