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RWE, Germany’s biggest power company, just pulled a slick one; selling off a UK data-centre project for a fat €225 million ($262 million) gain.
That decision gave the company a surprise boost to profits for the first nine months of the year.
And according to Bloomberg, the buyer is one of those massive cloud players, the type that run AI tools, crypto cloud rigs, and anything that needs a ton of juice, but RWE isn’t naming who it was.
This unexpected sale bumped up RWE’s nine-month adjusted EBITDA to €3.48 billion ($4.06 billion). That’s a 13% drop year-over-year, but still well above the €3.14 billion average forecast from analysts in a company-compiled poll.
And the interesting part is the cash from the deal didn’t even hit the bank until October, but RWE still baked it into the January-to-September numbers.
Meanwhile, RWE’s stock has surged by as much as 4.6% as of press time, peaking at their highest level since April 2011, according to data from Yahoo Finance.
RWE is riding on the back of that data-center deal like it was powered by Blackwell GPUs and a bucket of Red Bull.
AI boom sparks power rush and data‑center land grabs
According to analysts at Jefferies, RWE’s decision to sell makes perfect sense. Demand for energy-hungry AI compute is turning data centers into goldmines.
These hyperscalers (think Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon) are throwing billions into new sites, all of which eat power like crypto mines in a bull run. The site RWE sold is a former coal plant in the UK.
Michael Mueller, RWE’s finance boss, said, “The artificial intelligence boom is driving worldwide demand for electricity and, thus, the demand for renewable energy.”
And he’s not wrong. According to Barclays, the five biggest hyperscalers are on track to double their data center investments by 2027, hitting $500 billion a year.
Earlier this year, RWE slashed €10 billion from its green tech investment plans, blaming rising project costs, especially in (you guessed it) the United States.
While all this is going on, let’s talk about who’s actually holding the keys at RWE, because shockingly enough, retail investors control 52% of the company, according to Bloomberg’s data, while institutions sit at 39%, a typical sign for a big energy name. No hedge funds in sight though, and the biggest single holder is Qatar Holding LLC, with 9.2% of the shares. After that, the next two shareholders own 5.3% and 4.9%, respectively.
Even Capital Group, the American asset manager, just took a 3% stake in RWE.
But with project risks going up and returns getting harder to predict, it had no choice but to trim the green fat from its budget, which was worth around €10 billion.
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