Updates share activity in paragraph 3 and data center demand details in the last paragraph

May 8 (Reuters) - Utility Talen Energy TLN.O reported a loss for the first quarter on Thursday, hurt by higher interest and energy expenses, although data center demand prospects helped buffer losses.

Higher-for-longer interest rates burden utilities as they make investing in the construction and maintenance of power grids and other infrastructures more expensive.

Talen shares were up slightly in afternoon trade after falling by 3% in premarket trading.

Talen said its interest costs jumped 25.4% to $74 million during the reported quarter, while total energy expenses increased by 10.8% to $235 million.

The quarterly loss was also driven by an absence of the gains realized from the sale of a data center to Amazon AMZN.O last year for $650 million.

The results echo those of other nuclear utility peers such as Vistra VST.N and Constellation Energy CEG.O, which were also weighed by higher interest rates.

Talen owns and operates about 10.7 gigawatts of power infrastructure in the United States. It produces and sells electricity, capacity, and ancillary services into wholesale U.S. power markets.

Talen narrowed its full-year adjusted core profit outlook to be in the range of $975 million to $1.13 billion, from a prior view of $925 million to $1.18 billion.

The utility also said it had identified extra maintenance work in Unit 2 of the Susquehanna nuclear facility, which had already been placed under a planned outage in March.

"We have elected to complete this scope of work while Unit 2 is already in outage and market prices and demand are relatively low," Talen said, adding the outage will be extended into mid-May.

The Houston-Texas based company reported a net loss attributable to stockholders of $135 million for the quarter ended March 31, compared with a profit of $294 million a year ago.

The company, however, said it was continuing to increase electricity to an Amazon data center at Talen's Pennsylvania nuclear power plant. Executives said they were optimistic about other deals with technology companies to supply huge quantities of electricity for data centers, which are used for the expansion of artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

(Reporting by Katha Kalia in Bengaluru, additional reporting by Laila Kearney; Editing by Shailesh Kuber and Chris Reese)

((Katha.Kalia@thomsonreuters.com;))