Türkiye breaks ground on $4.1B Ankara data center complex

Joint venture breaks ground in Ankara

Turkish Industry and Technology Minister Mehmet Fatih Kacir on Monday joined executives from Ronesans Holding and Digital Realty to break ground on a 22-megawatt data center complex in Ankara's Baskent Organized Industrial Zone, launching a project officials said will anchor Türkiye's bid to become a regional digital hub. The ceremony marked the commencement of construction on the initial phase of a facility that will eventually house cutting-edge cloud computing and artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Kacir said the initial construction phase requires $450 million for basic infrastructure and building work, with an additional $900 million earmarked for cooling systems and IT hardware. "Once all phases are complete, this facility will represent a fixed capital investment of $4.1 billion in the Ankara Temelli Baskent Organized Industrial Zone," he said. The minister described data processing and cloud computing capabilities as "the oil of the 21st century," noting that global data center capacity is expected to double from 103 gigawatts to 200 gigawatts by 2030.

Government incentives and infrastructure

Ankara has allocated $30 billion through 2030 under the HIT-30 program to attract high-tech investments and support cloud computing infrastructure essential for artificial intelligence applications. Kacir noted that the initiative includes a $1.4 billion "HIT-Data Center Call" for facilities of at least 30 megawatts and a $1.6 billion "HIT-Artificial Intelligence Call" to accelerate domestic cloud infrastructure. The government has already supported more than 8,900 researchers through the Turkish Science e-Infrastructure (TRUBA), which operates over 80,000 processor cores, 504 graphics processing units and 26 petabytes of storage capacity.

Regional hub ambitions

The minister announced the "GPU for Everyone" program to provide entrepreneurs and researchers with access to high-performance chips, creating what he called a comprehensive AI ecosystem backed by robust infrastructure. Kacir added that Ronesans Holding and Digital Realty plan to invest more than $10 billion across Ankara and Istanbul to establish 200 megawatts of data center capacity, representing one-fifth of Türkiye's national goal to reach at least 1 gigawatt by 2030.