1) Internal risks and controls within the datacenter (the company involved and their operating history, fires, flood, etc,) -- for a sufficiently "good" datacenter, you can assume it gets maxed out in quality, or at least to the point where it's no longer efficient to spend more. Most of these risks also cause service disruptions, so if you're building for high availability anyway, the rest of this stuff is usually handled as part of that. Essentially, if you're too cheap to build a good enough datacenter to max this out, you're not getting insurance anyway in most cases, so it's not a variable factor so bunch as binary or maybe a few broad risk bands (ISO tier for datacenters).

2) External risks. This is mostly natural catastrophe ("nat cat" or "cat risk"); usually there's one dominant driver of that ("severe convective storms" in Texas; floods and hurricanes in places like Florida; earthquakes in California). In some places it's multiple risks (Japan has both earthquake/tsunami and typhoon). This drives the majority of insurance premium.

War risk, geopolitical, political risk, terrorism, SRCC ("strikes, riots, and civil commotion") are in a third category -- often essentially not a factor (e.g. for a $200mm facility in rural Texas), but often handled through special programs at a national level or specialty insurance. A lot of normal policies exclude or let the client buy-back that part of the risk.

As my personal interests in war zones, drones, etc. and professional interests in crypto, AI, and datacenters seem to have converged, looking forward to seeing "quality of air defense artillery/integrated air defense system" as well as "comprehensive quick reaction force capable of dealing with national-level threats" as elements of insurance underwriting for $50B AI datacenters/"AI factories" in the future. I assume in most cases this kind of stuff will be handled by national, military, defense, or civil defense parts of the government, but could easily be contracted as well. I don't think Oracle Cloud is likely to stand up their own private army though.

I also agree with the sibling comment that suggests even if there were outsourced options available, hyperscalers might do better to self-insure.

But regardless whether the company eats it, or pays it through insurance premiums, I'm still curious how this type of risk is planned for (to whatever degree it is) and accounted. I assume it must have been contemplated in a deliberate manner, somewhere on a scale of "We knew this could happen, considered x, y and z, decided the venture was justified, and here's how we planned for such a contingency" to "That was dumb siting and someone will be fired". Obviously anywhere you put a building entails some level of local risk.

As years as a volunteer firefighter we do a lot of risk management at the tactical level and have to think through assessment and potential consequences. There are lots of guidelines we learn to help produce sound decisions. But at the end of the day to apply them you may need to make a judgement call, and you need to be prepared for things to go wrong. In a way I guess I'm asking about the economic and operational equivalent at the scale of hundred-million dollar data centers.

https://xkcd.com/1737/

Ps. Like the original commenter said, I'm in no way meaning to be insensitive to the larger human and regional consequences.

It's much like the USofA in that regard.

In more practical terms, wrecking shit up in places like Dubai that made their name off air travel and attracting "expat" douchebags, is a very effective way to get them to pressure the US to stop the war. So is blowing up oil infra and stopping transit in Hormuz for allied nations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Support_Activity_Bahrain

Same for Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, etc.; all host US bases. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-military-facili...

"Videos verified by Storyful, which is owned by News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, indicate that at least some of the launches came from Bahrain, the tiny kingdom just 125 miles across the Gulf from Iran."

The air bases are still being used as launch pads for drone strikes and chopper missions.

Same as sanctions. There are many places where they can not tell governments what to do, so they suffocate general population