Let us imagine, if you can bear it, that it is Monday morning. You’ve taken out your laptop and connected to the wi-fi to start a day of working from home, thinking about the week ahead. What you may not be thinking about, however, is the physical infrastructure that enables you to be connected to your colleagues who are many miles away.

Digital infrastructure — think data centres, transmission towers, and fibre networks — is essential to today’s economy. Burgeoning digital industries mean the requirement to support these assets will only grow in the near future.

Data deluge

Take cloud computing: end user spending in this sector currently has a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 20 percent, according to Grand View Research, and this growth looks set to continue until the end of the decade.

Then, of course, there is AI. So often the subject of headlines, spending on this technology is set to have a CAGR of 27 percent by 2