Turkey targets 1 GW of data center capacity by 2030 as Ankara site breaks ground

Turkey aims to lift its installed data center power to at least 1 gigawatt by 2030, Industry and Technology Minister Mehmet Fatih Kacır said on October 19, 2026. He spoke at the groundbreaking of a data center being built by Turkish group Rönesans and US data center operator Digital Realty in the Başkent Organized Industrial Zone in Temelli, Ankara.

According to the minister, the site will open with 22 megawatts of capacity backed by $450 million in infrastructure and building work. A further $900 million is planned for advanced cooling and high-capacity computing equipment. Once every phase is finished, fixed capital investment at the location is expected to reach $4.1 billion.

Kacır said the two companies plan to build 200 megawatts across Ankara and Istanbul through investments exceeding $10 billion in total. On its own, he noted, that would cover a fifth of the national 2030 target.

Incentives behind the push

The capacity goal sits within Turkey's 2026-2030 Artificial Intelligence Action Plan, which foresees more than $10 billion in data center, cloud and AI infrastructure investment by 2030, mostly from the private sector. The plan also includes AI Growth Zones and a GPU for Everyone programme meant to give startups and scientists easier access to compute.

Funding comes through HIT-30, a $30 billion incentive scheme running to 2030. Its $1.5 billion data center call supports high-grade facilities of at least 30 megawatts, while a separate $1.6 billion AI call targets cloud infrastructure and a quantum call backs quantum technologies. Kacır said investment incentives have enabled 42 billion lira in data center projects since 2012.

On the public research side, the national science e-infrastructure TRUBA now offers more than 80,000 processor cores, 504 GPUs and 26 petabytes of storage, used by over 8,900 researchers. Turkey also gives its scientists access to European supercomputers through the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

Why it matters

Kacır cited research projecting global data center capacity to grow from about 103 gigawatts in 2025 to 200 gigawatts by 2030, and said data centers made up more than a fifth of new international investment projects announced in 2025. Framing digital sovereignty as part of national independence, he argued that future winners will be those delivering compute with the least energy, a pitch Turkey is pairing with its location and renewable potential to attract AI infrastructure money.