Summary
- XDI analysed 2,595 planned data centre sites worldwide and identified climate-risk hotspots among fast-growing investment regions.
- European exposure includes France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, with Europe’s average damage risk modelled to rise sharply by 2100.
- The findings push climate resilience into site selection, design standards, insurance, power, water, and operational continuity.
XDI has warned that billions flowing into AI infrastructure may be underestimating physical climate risk, after analysing 2,595 planned data centre sites worldwide for direct damage exposure, operational heat disruption, and indirect infrastructure dependencies.
The firm’s global analysis identifies several European hotspots, including Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Hauts-de-France in France, Lazio in Italy, Berlin in Germany, and Spain for operational heat disruption risk. Globally, XDI modelled 154 of the 2,595 planned sites, or 6%, as high risk in 2026 under low-resilience construction settings.
Europe’s overall exposure is lower than some Asian regions today, but XDI says the region faces a 289% increase in average damage risk by 2100. The analysis also says France attracted US$69bn in foreign data centre investment in 2025, more than any other country worldwide, while 26% of the planned French facilities analysed were classed as high risk in 2026 under low-resilience settings.
The findings move data centre sustainability beyond energy consumption and water use. Those remain central, but physical climate risk asks whether the site, supporting infrastructure, and operating model will remain resilient over the expected life of the asset. That includes heat, flooding, storms, water stress, grid reliability, telecommunications, transport, and supply-chain dependencies.
Large AI and hyperscale data centres concentrate rising asset values in power-intensive buildings. A physical climate event that damages the building is only one risk. Heat can reduce cooling performance, extreme weather can affect electricity systems, and disruption to roads, telecoms, or water networks can affect operations even if the data hall itself is untouched.
The hidden exposure sits outside the fence
XDI’s analysis places indirect risk close to the centre of the problem. The firm says a separate analysis of 138 existing and planned European data centres found that when indirect risk is included, productivity loss is modelled as 10 times higher than when considering direct risk alone. Data centres depend on the systems around them, and those dependencies can fail before the building does.
A facility can be hardened against flooding and still suffer commercially if access roads are blocked, telecommunications are disrupted, water supply is constrained, or power networks are impaired. A site with robust surrounding infrastructure may perform better over time even when headline climate exposure looks similar on a map.
Climate risk therefore becomes a site-selection and engineering issue rather than a sustainability communications issue. Developers and investors need to understand not only whether a location has cheap land, renewable power, or a favourable planning regime, but whether it can remain operational under changing climate conditions. That assessment should influence ground levels, drainage, cooling design, backup power, power-route diversity, water strategy, maintenance access, and insurance assumptions.
Extreme heat is particularly relevant for AI infrastructure. Dense GPU clusters produce high thermal loads, and the margin between normal operation and constrained cooling can become tighter during heatwaves. Spain is identified by XDI as one of the countries where planned data centres record some of the highest projected operational disruption risk from heat. France and Australia are also named among markets where heat-linked risk could increase rapidly, despite not always being treated as traditional data centre heat-risk hotspots.
Insurers will ask harder questions
The analysis points towards a financing issue as well as an engineering one. XDI cites Swiss Re projections that global insurance premiums associated with data centre infrastructure could rise from US$10.6bn today to US$24.2bn by 2030. That trajectory would make climate-risk due diligence more material to project finance, lease pricing, and asset valuation.
Insurance markets are already paying closer attention to catastrophe exposure and business interruption. Data centres concentrate high asset values and operational revenue in tightly specified buildings. As campuses grow and AI hardware values rise, insurers may push harder on site resilience, flood mapping, cooling redundancy, backup power, and emergency response procedures.
For Europe, the analysis arrives as the region encourages more domestic AI infrastructure, sovereign cloud capacity, and advanced compute, while also tightening environmental reporting and energy-efficiency scrutiny. Climate resilience now sits alongside PUE, WUE, renewable procurement, heat reuse, and grid flexibility. A site can perform well on annual energy metrics and still carry long-term physical risk if it is exposed to flood, heat, or weak surrounding infrastructure.
The most useful part of the XDI work is the pressure it places on pre-construction decisions. Land choice, elevation, drainage, cooling system, power topology, and external dependency mapping can materially affect resilience and insurability over the life of the asset.
The AI build-out is moving quickly, but climate risk runs on a longer curve. Facilities planned around current conditions will operate into a different climate. Developers, lenders, insurers, and authorities will increasingly have to test whether the next generation of data centres is being built for the weather, water, and grid conditions of its operating life, not just the conditions visible at financial close.
