The State of Michigan Retirement System is adding $326m (€297.7m) to its existing US data centre account relationship managed by Principal Real Estate Investors.

Michigan Retirement disclosed in a meeting document that it had approved the additional capital to the SMP Data Center, which holds assets worth just over $1bn.

The SMP Data Center account represents 71% of the assets managed by Principal on behalf of the pension fund.

According to industry sources, the SMP Data Center separate account represents one of the largest data centre-only relationships held by a public pension fund in the US.

Research conducted by CenterSquare Investment Management reveals that demand for data centres is being driven in part by key data centre tenants like Microsoft, Apple and IBM investing heavily in cloud computing to keep developing AI.

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