A RWE logo is seen in this illustration taken October 20, 2021. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
FRANKFURT/DUESSELDORF (Reuters) -RWE, Germany's largest power producer, reported higher than expected profit for the first nine months of the year, boosted by a 225 million euro ($262 million) book gain on the sale of a data centre project to a large cloud service provider.
Nine-month adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation fell by 13% to 3.48 billion euros ($4.06 billion), said RWE, beating the 3.14 billion average forecast in a company-provided poll.
This was mainly driven by the sale of the data centre project, located on the site of a former coal-fired power plant in Britain, to a hyperscaler, RWE said, adding that even though the funds were not received until October, the deal was still reflected in nine-month figures.
RWE declined to name the buyer.
Shares in Frankfurt-listed RWE were 1.6% higher at 0717 GMT.
Analysts at Jefferies said they expected the sale of the UK project to be well received as it was part of a wider trend around spending on artificial intelligence, with data centres requiring large amounts of power.
Hyperscaler typically refers to large cloud service providers such as Meta Platforms, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet's Google, companies that have planned massive investments to build more data centres and power energy-hungry AI computing.
"The artificial intelligence boom is driving worldwide demand for electricity and, thus, the demand for renewable energy," RWE's finance chief Michael Mueller said.
"These are good prospects for our business."
Investments from the five major hyperscalers, which also includes Oracle, is expected to roughly double from 2024 to 2027 to $500 billion annually, according to Barclays strategists.
($1 = 0.8575 euros)
(Reporting by Christoph Steitz and Tom Kaeckenhoff, Editing by Miranda Murray and Alexander Smith)
