Altes Capital and Zero Intensity target data centre risk repricing
Altes Capital, an alternative investment manager focused on institutional allocators, has announced a strategic collaboration with data verification firm Zero Intensity to bring structured environmental and operational analysis to data centre underwriting. The tie-up arrives as the sector faces a compounding squeeze: surging AI-driven demand on one side, and a wall of permitting, power, and community-acceptance constraints on the other.
The scale of the problem is not abstract. Data Center Watch reported that US projects with publicly disclosed values of at least $156 billion were blocked or delayed in 2025 alone. Goldman Sachs estimates cumulative AI-infrastructure capital expenditure of roughly $7.6 trillion between 2026 and 2031. The gap between those two numbers represents the central underwriting challenge this collaboration is designed to address: how do institutional investors distinguish projects that will actually get built from those that will stall?
Standardising the environmental layer
At the core of the arrangement is Zero Intensity's Protocol (ZIP), a framework designed to standardise how environmental attributes are measured, verified, and reported at the asset level. Altes expects to evaluate ZIP as part of its diligence process for data centre infrastructure opportunities. Assets satisfying applicable criteria may receive Zero Intensity's Clean Compute designation, a proprietary differentiation marker that the company is explicit is neither a government certification nor a guarantee of zero-emissions performance.
Jonathan Siegel of Altes Capital framed the rationale in terms of deliverability rather than environmental virtue alone: "Power access, permitting credibility, community acceptance, and long-term financeability are becoming central to underwriting. We believe more rigorous environmental-intensity analysis can help improve transparency, reduce execution risk, and support infrastructure that is more resilient, more accountable, and better aligned with the communities where it is built."
The collaboration also draws in CAC, part of the Baldwin Group insurance brokerage, which signals the insurance market's growing appetite for granular asset-level data. Chelley Schaper, EVP of Property and Casualty at CAC, noted that carriers are shifting from binary coverage decisions toward dynamic premium pricing tied to measurable sustainability metrics, rewarding operators who can demonstrate superior environmental performance with better access to coverage.
The convergence angle: when infrastructure risk becomes a capital-markets problem
What makes this story material beyond the data centre sector is the structural read-across to insurance, green finance, and sovereign capital allocation. The announcement reflects a broader convergence now under way: environmental performance data, historically the domain of ESG reporting teams, is migrating into the hard infrastructure of financial underwriting, insurance pricing, and institutional diligence. That migration has consequences well beyond compute.
The same dynamic is playing out in energy transition assets, logistics hubs, and bioprocessing facilities, all of which face analogous permitting and community-acceptance barriers as they scale. If frameworks like ZIP demonstrate that standardised environmental verification can sharpen risk pricing in data centres, the template is portable. Insurers repricing data centre risk on the back of verified environmental data would represent a meaningful shift in how capital markets internalise physical and regulatory risk across energy-intensive infrastructure categories.
Recent Gallup polling cited in the release found that seven in ten Americans oppose building AI data centres in their local communities, a figure that, if it holds, will weigh on project timelines well beyond the current pipeline. For institutional allocators already navigating compressed yields in traditional infrastructure, the ability to underwrite deliverability risk more precisely could become a genuine competitive differentiator.
The collaboration does not announce a specific investment product or transaction. The immediate next step is Altes beginning to incorporate ZIP into live diligence processes, with both firms signalling intent to engage further with institutional investors and insurers seeking more rigorous frameworks for this asset class.