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The AI boom is usually described as a technology story. It is also an infrastructure story. Every model trained and every query answered runs through buildings that sit in specific places, on specific ground, exposed to specific weather. Those buildings are capital-intensive, long-lived and effectively immovable once constructed, which makes their physical climate exposure a financial question rather than an operational one.
Scientific Climate Ratings analysed 1,000 data centres across 34 countries and 11 major operators to understand where that exposure sits. The analysis covers wind, flood, wildfire and heat under SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios to 2035 and 2050, translating asset-level hazard exposure into expected structural damage and operational disruption.
The central finding is that physical climate risk is driven much more by where a data centre is located than by who operates it. By 2050, the average discounted cost of inaction ranges from 3.4% of asset value in Sweden to 20.6% in Japan. The operator-level range is far narrower, from 4.3% for Meta to 9.6% for NTT. Facilities belonging to the same operator can sit at opposite ends of the physical-risk spectrum.
The hazard picture is uneven. Wind is the dominant portfolio-wide risk, affecting all 1,000 assets with a median structural damage of 0.58% of asset value under SSP5-8.5 at 2050. Flood is far more concentrated, registering at only 185 facilities, but far more severe where it lands: the worst-placed site reaches 8.92% structural damage. Wildfire and heat, by contrast, produce only small directly monetised impacts in this sample.
Exposure is also not the same as vulnerability. NTT’s TK9 Data Center in Kōtō, Tokyo, has a modelled annual value impact of 11.31% before its documented flood adaptation and resilience measures are taken into account. Incorporating the measures already in place reduces that to 4.26%, a 62% reduction, and cuts the discounted cost of inaction to 2050 from 65.4% to 29.5% of asset value. The facility remains highly exposed and retains a G rating, but substantially less of that exposure converts into financial loss.
The full report sets out the methodology, the hazard-by-hazard results, country and operator rankings, and the TK9 resilience deep dive.