FRANKFURT, Nov 12 (Reuters) - RWE, Germany's largest

power producer, reported higher-than-expected profits for the

first nine months of the year, boosted by a 225 million euro

($262 million) book gain due to 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.

The term hyperscaler typically refers to large cloud service

providers such as Meta Platforms ( META ), Amazon ( AMZN ),

Microsoft ( MSFT ) 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)