May 2 (Reuters) - Southern Co's electricity sales to data centers and other commercial customers, as well as a growing pool of customers in the U.S. South, helped drive a first-quarter profit beat, company executives said on Thursday.

Electricity sales to data centers were up 12% in the first three months of 2024, compared with the same period last year, with about a quarter of the growth coming from new developments versus existing centers ramping up, Southern Co executives said on an earnings call.

Southern Co, based in Atlanta, said its business was also boosted by a fast-growing population in its territories in Georgia and other Southern states. The company said it added more than 13,000 residential electric customers and over 7,000 residential gas customers in the first quarter. Industrial sales, led by lumber and paper industries, also showed some signs of rebounding after a weak first quarter last year, executives said.

Utilities are betting on benefiting on a boom in electricity demand driven by data centers used for powering technologies such as generative AI, which has led to revisions in capital expenditure plans and demand forecasts for many utilities at the start of the year.

Analysts, however, have questioned whether regulated utilities will be able to cash in on some of the projected demand, with concerns including data center businesses developing their own power generation or withdrawing proposed projects to chase better deals in other localities or states.

Southern Co executives said they have worked to "de-risk" the company's growth outlook by excluding data center developments that seemed particularly unlikely.

The Atlanta-based company posted adjusted profit of $1.03 per share in the quarter, compared with analysts' average estimate of 90 cents per share, according to LSEG data.

Southern Co, which serves 9 million customers across the Southeast, reaffirmed its full-year adjusted profit forecast in the range of $3.95 to $4.05 per share.

This week, Southern Co announced that its long-delayed Vogtle unit 4 nuclear reactor in Georgia entered service, and could, among other uses, serve data center demand, executives said.

(Reporting by Laila Kearney in New York and Kabir Dweit in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar and Leslie Adler)