Proactive Investors - Shares in Harworth Group PLC (LON:HWG), the 'land regenerator' that started life as part of UK Coal, jumped 10% after it sold a site in Leeds to Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) for £106 million for a what it called a "hyperscale" datacentre.
Contracts have been exchanged for the sale of 48 acres of land at its Skelton Grange site, with the first cash payment expected later this year and the other in the first half of 2026.
Once the development is complete, the site of the former Skelton Grange power station is expected to provide around 250,000 square feet of industrial & logistics space, a hyperscale datacentre, a battery energy storage facility and an energy-from-waste facility.
Roughly 28 acres of the land will be "returned to a natural habitat" with improved infrastructure for walking and cycling.
The sale to Microsoft is conditional, payable in cash in two tranches linked to phased completion of the sale, with conditions "customary for a transaction of this nature", Harworth said, adding that it is confident they will be met.
The disposal price represents a premium to the plot's book value.
Harworth estimated the deal will represent at least £4 billion of investment to the local economy.
It bought the former Skelton Grange power station site in 2014 for around £3 million before carrying out remediation works, said invested circa £36.7 million in the site and generated £135.7 million of sales.
Hyperscale data centres are significantly larger than enterprise data centers, typically with more than 5,000 servers across at least 10,000 square feet.
Data centers consume a lot of power — 10 to 50 times more energy per floor space than a typical commercial office building — with hyperscale data centres using an average of 20-50 megawatts (MW) of power or up to 150 MW – equivalent to the energy consumption of a decent sized city.