Microsoft has acquired a plot of land in the north of the UK for a data center development.
Real estate group Harworth this week announced it had sold 48 acres of land at its Skelton Grange site in Leeds for £106.6 million ($134.83m) to Microsoft.
The deal comprises two adjacent plots, with the deals due to close in H2 2024 and H1 2026. Microsoft’s MSFT MCIO Limited is the buyer. Harworth said Microsoft has acquired the site with plans to develop a hyperscale data center campus.
Plot 1 comprises 27 acres and sold for £52.9 million ($67m). Plot 2 totals 21 acres and will be sold for £53.2 million ($67.3m). Further details of Microsoft’s plans for the site weren’t shared.
Located to the Southeast of Leeds, Harworth bought the former Skelton Grange power station site in December 2014 for c.£3 million ($3.8m), with remediation and enabling works commencing shortly after. The company has secured planning approval for more than 1 million sq ft (92,903 sqm) of industrial and logistics space on the site to date.
“Since re-listing in 2015 Harworth has successfully completed a number of significant transactions that create value for our shareholders but this sale at Skelton Grange is the Group’s largest to date and is yet another exemplary case study that demonstrates the successful regeneration of brownfield land,” said Lynda Shillaw, chief executive, Harworth Group. “This transaction further builds our expertise to include data centers and evidences the growing spectrum of industries that continue to be attracted to the schemes that Harworth brings to the serviced land market.”
Harworth has owned the Skelton site since 2016. The company sold around 20 acres to Enfinium in 2019, on which it is developing a 49MW energy-from-waste renewable electricity generation facility. In 2020 Skelton Peak Power submitted plans to develop a 100MW Battery Energy Storage System facility on five acres at the site.
Skelton Grange power station comprised two coal-powered stations in the Stourton area of Leeds totaling 800MW. Work started on the first plant in the late 1940s, and work on the second finished in the early 1960s; plant A was decommissioned in 1983, and B in 1994.
After it was decommissioned, the site was considered for a new stadium for the Leeds United football team in 2001, and later as a depot for the planned and then abandoned eastern branch of the High Speed 2 rail line. RWE npower wanted to construct industrial warehousing on the site as far back as 2007.
This is the second data center campus Microsoft is looking to develop outside Leeds. In February, DCD reported that Microsoft was proposing to develop a data center campus on the site of a decommissioned power station in Eggborough, North Yorkshire. Eggborough is around 20 miles east of the Skelton site.
