ZURICH, June 29 -- The race to build more artificial intelligence data centres is running into an increasingly expensive obstacle: extreme weather.

Record-breaking heatwaves, floods, wildfires and violent storms are emerging as major risks to the facilities powering AI, raising fears of higher insurance bills, power shortages and costly outages.

"Severe weather is no longer something that can be treated as a background exposure," Patrick McBride, Zurich Insurance's head of international construction said in an interview today with US business news outlet CNBC.

The insurer said extreme weather has become the biggest source of losses in its US data centre construction portfolio over the past three years, accounting for about a third of a...