The UK's Met Office is looking to sell off its Exeter Science Park leasehold property, including a data center.

In a tender published late last year and expiring in January 2025, the Met Office sought out real estate agency services to help with the "disposal" of the property.

According to the tender, the property is owned by the Met Office with a 999-year leasehold interest. The property is a combination of office space and a data center which cannot be separated, thus the Met Office is solely looking to work with estate agents with data center "expertise."

In addition, the leasehold limits that the owner must have a science and/or research basis for their work.

The total site area of the property for sale spans 13,240 sqm (142,514 sq ft).

The data center at the science park was constructed in 2016 and housed a Cray-manufactured Met Office supercomputer, the organization's third-generation supercomputer which had a capacity of 16,000 trillion calculations per second. The primary contractor was Willmott Dixon.

According to reports at the time of construction, the IT hall is a single-story steel portal-framed structure, 90m long and 25m wide.

The sale is likely motivated by the Met Office's 2021 switch to a Microsoft-provided supercomputer, which is housed in Microsoft's data centers "that have been designed and optimized for these supercomputers, rather than generic cloud hosting,” Microsoft told DCD in 2022.

The Met Office's new Microsoft supercomputer offers 60 petaflops of computer capacity and was part of a £1.2 billion ($1.56bn) contract.

In January 2022, Australian storage conversion company Tape Ark was awarded a subcontract to handle the digitization of the Met Office's tape data and transfer it to Azure Cloud.

DCD has contacted the Met Office to find out when the department fully exited the property, and to see if it has now indeed been listed.

Learn more about how supercomputers help with weather forecasting in the latest DCD Magazine.