Digital Realty’s entry into Türkiye through a new joint venture with Rönesans Infrastructure marks a significant foreign direct investment signal for the country’s digital infrastructure market, not because the first project is the largest in the region, but because it brings one of the world’s major data center platforms into a market where cloud demand, data residency rules, energy planning and government incentives are beginning to converge.
A Strategic Entry Into Ankara
Digital Realty announced on September 14, 2026 that it had formed a strategic joint venture with Rönesans Infrastructure to develop and operate next-generation data centers across Türkiye. According to Digital Realty’s own release and reporting by The Fast Mode, the venture’s first investment will be a carrier-neutral data center campus in Ankara with more than 22 megawatts of IT capacity. Land, power and permitting have already been secured, early construction has begun, and completion is scheduled for 2028.
The choice of Ankara is notable. Istanbul remains Türkiye’s commercial, financial and connectivity hub, and The Fast Mode reported that the joint venture also intends to expand there. Yet Ankara offers proximity to government, public sector workloads and national digital infrastructure priorities. For cloud providers, enterprise customers and state-linked institutions, latency, resilience and regulatory comfort can matter as much as raw capacity.
Digital Realty framed the move as an extension of PlatformDIGITAL into Türkiye. The company describes itself as the world’s largest cloud and carrier-neutral data center platform, and its 2026 corporate materials cite more than 300 data centers across more than 55 metros. In its second-quarter 2026 results, Digital Realty reported revenue of $1.9 billion, up 29 percent year on year, and a record signed but not commenced backlog of $1.9 billion in annualized GAAP base rent at 100 percent share. That global demand backdrop matters for Türkiye, because operators are no longer expanding only in established hubs such as Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam or Northern Virginia. They are also looking for politically and geographically useful secondary hubs where power, land and permitting can be secured.
Why Türkiye Is Becoming More Relevant
Türkiye’s investment case is rooted in geography, demographics and regulation. The country sits between Europe, the Middle East, the Caucasus and Central Asia, giving it a plausible role as a regional digital transit and cloud services market. That thesis has been repeated often, but the recent evidence is stronger than it was a few years ago.
The U.S. International Trade Administration’s 2026 Türkiye digital economy guide estimated the Turkish e-commerce market at about $93.5 billion in 2025 and projected it to reach $154.9 billion by 2030. The same source said e-commerce’s share of GDP increased from 2.7 percent in 2019 to 6.5 percent in 2024. That points to rising domestic demand for payment systems, logistics platforms, customer data processing, cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure.
The Turkish Investment Office also highlighted another major cloud-related milestone in November 2025, when Turkcell and Google Cloud announced plans for Türkiye’s first hyperscale regional data center. According to the Investment Office, the agreement involved a combined $3 billion investment, with Google committing $2 billion over 10 years and Turkcell planning $1 billion. Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz described the Google Cloud partnership as a step that strengthened Türkiye’s digital sovereignty and regional positioning.
Seen together, the Turkcell-Google plan and the Digital Realty-Rönesans joint venture suggest Türkiye is moving from an enterprise colocation market toward a more strategic cloud and AI infrastructure destination. For foreign investors, that shift affects market entry analysis. The question is no longer simply whether Turkish firms need local hosting. It is whether Türkiye can become a regional platform for workloads serving domestic users, public sector institutions, financial services, e-commerce companies and nearby emerging markets.
Global Data Center Constraints Create an Opening
The timing is favorable for new geographies. CBRE’s Global Data Center Trends 2025 report said the global weighted average data center vacancy rate fell to 6.6 percent in the first quarter of 2025, down 2.1 percentage points year on year. CBRE also identified limited power availability as the main inhibitor of growth in core hubs and said power constraints were forcing preleasing and pushing construction timelines into 2027 and beyond.
The International Energy Agency’s Energy and AI analysis shows why power is now central to data center strategy. The IEA projects global data center electricity consumption to roughly double to about 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, with electricity use from accelerated servers, mainly driven by AI, rising by about 30 percent annually in its base case. The same analysis notes that the United States, China and Europe will remain the largest demand regions, but that other markets are becoming more important as cloud and AI infrastructure spreads.
Türkiye will not automatically benefit from those constraints. Data centers are industrial-scale energy users, and large operators require credible grid connections, redundancy, cooling strategies, security, fiber routes and clear power procurement structures. But the Ankara project’s reported progress on land, power and permitting is commercially important because in today’s market, securing those inputs early can be as valuable as announcing capital expenditure.
This is where project management becomes a core FDI issue rather than an afterthought. A foreign investor evaluating a data center, cloud node, edge site or enterprise technology facility in Türkiye must coordinate site selection, grid access, construction sequencing, equipment importation, tax treatment, local subcontractors and operating licenses. The Digital Realty-Rönesans structure implicitly recognizes that local execution capability is part of the investment thesis.
Incentives, Energy And The Regulatory Stack
Türkiye has been sharpening its pitch to high-technology investors. The Ministry of Industry and Technology’s HIT-30 program describes comprehensive support and incentives for priority technology projects, with digital technologies among the listed priority areas. Advisory summaries of the 2025 HIT-30 calls report a $1.5 billion support budget for data center investments and a separate $1.6 billion artificial intelligence call. Those summaries cite criteria such as minimum IT capacity, AI-compatible hardware, power usage effectiveness standards and integration with large-scale cloud or AI centers.
For investors, incentives are attractive but complex. Eligibility is not a simple matter of registering a company and applying for a tax break. Project size, technology specifications, energy efficiency, employment commitments, investment location and implementation timelines can affect whether a project qualifies. Incentives advisory work therefore becomes central to the feasibility model, especially for capital-intensive infrastructure where tax support, energy support or employment incentives can change the internal rate of return.
Energy is the other hard constraint. Türkiye’s Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources said that by the end of August 2026 the country’s installed electricity capacity had reached 126,944 MW. It reported that 2025 electricity generation came from coal at 33.6 percent, natural gas at 23 percent, hydropower at 15.8 percent, wind at 10.9 percent, solar at 10.5 percent, geothermal at 3.2 percent and other sources at 3.1 percent. The IEA said in September 2026 that renewables supplied 43 percent of Türkiye’s electricity generation in 2025 and that the National Energy Plan envisages 55 percent by 2035.
That mix gives Türkiye an improving sustainability story, but not a frictionless one. Large data center users will scrutinize renewable power sourcing, grid reliability, backup generation, carbon accounting and exposure to imported gas price volatility. Legal and tax compliance teams also need to assess electricity market rules, power purchase arrangements, equipment import duties, VAT treatment, customs procedures and local environmental permitting.
Data Sovereignty Raises The Stakes
Digital infrastructure investment in Türkiye is also shaped by data protection law. Linklaters’ Data Protected guide notes that Türkiye amended its Personal Data Protection Law framework in March 2024 and that cross-border personal data transfers now operate under a three-tier mechanism. Transfers may rely on adequacy decisions, appropriate safeguards such as standard contractual clauses or binding corporate rules, or limited derogations where neither route is available. Linklaters also notes that Türkiye enacted Cybersecurity Law No. 7545 on March 19, 2025, creating a broader cyber resilience framework.
For cloud, AI and colocation investors, these rules are not peripheral. They influence which workloads customers are willing to host locally, how contracts are structured, whether foreign parent companies can access Turkish user data, and how incident notification procedures must be designed. Financial institutions, healthcare providers, public sector bodies and regulated telecom businesses often require more conservative data localization or audit arrangements than ordinary commercial users.
That creates demand for local infrastructure but also raises compliance costs. Market entry teams need to map customer segments by regulatory sensitivity. Incorporation and corporate structuring decisions need to consider whether services are provided by a Turkish entity, a foreign branch, a joint venture or a layered holding structure. Legal and tax compliance work must address data processing inventories, service-level agreements, cybersecurity obligations, employment rules and foreign exchange exposure.
Government relations also matter. Data centers intersect with ministries, municipalities, energy authorities, telecom regulators, data protection authorities and investment agencies. The fact that Digital Realty partnered with Rönesans Infrastructure, a large Turkish investment and development group with a record in complex infrastructure delivery, underlines the importance of navigating institutional interfaces in a coordinated way.
Türkiye’s FDI Context Is Improving, But Selective
The broader FDI environment is relevant. The Turkish Investment Office said Türkiye attracted $13.1 billion in FDI in 2025, a 12.2 percent year-on-year increase based on Central Bank of the Republic of Türkiye balance of payments data. It said information and communication ranked third among sectors, accounting for 14 percent of total inflows. Separately, the Investment Office’s Türkiye FDI Projects Report 2025 counted 475 greenfield FDI projects with expected capital expenditure of $21.1 billion and 47,251 jobs.
The World Bank’s April 2026 Türkiye Macro Poverty Outlook provides the cautionary side of the picture. It projected 2.8 percent growth in 2026 and 3.7 percent in 2027, while noting gradual disinflation, tight monetary conditions and sensitivity to energy prices. For infrastructure investors, this means Türkiye’s fundamentals are not one-dimensional. The country offers scale, location and policy support, but financing costs, currency risk and inflation-linked construction costs must be actively managed.
Data centers are especially exposed to imported equipment. Servers, cooling systems, electrical switchgear, backup power systems and network equipment require careful import-export planning. Customs classification, delivery schedules, warranty structures and foreign supplier contracts can materially affect project execution. Expo and trade-fair representation can also play a role for technology suppliers seeking Turkish partners, since the ecosystem around data centers includes electrical contractors, engineering firms, security providers, fiber operators and facility management companies.
What This Means for Foreign Investors
Digital Realty’s Türkiye move should be read as a validation signal, not a guarantee that every foreign technology or infrastructure investor will find easy execution. The opportunity is real, but it is operationally demanding.
Investors considering Türkiye need a disciplined market entry process that tests customer demand by sector, compares Ankara, Istanbul and secondary locations, and evaluates whether the business case depends on domestic customers, regional traffic or public sector workloads. Incorporation and corporate structuring decisions should be made early, particularly where a joint venture, local operating company or incentive-linked project company is being considered.
Investment incentives require detailed pre-application analysis, including capacity thresholds, AI hardware compatibility, energy efficiency criteria and completion timelines. Legal and tax compliance must cover KVKK, cybersecurity law, contracts, employment, VAT, customs and cross-border data transfer mechanisms. Government relations are important for coordinating permits, power access, municipal engagement and regulatory communication. Import-export facilitation and project management become decisive once equipment procurement, construction, commissioning and operational readiness begin.
For Türkiye, the Digital Realty-Rönesans joint venture is another step toward positioning the country as a regional digital infrastructure hub. For foreign investors, it is a reminder that successful FDI in this sector depends less on headline demand and more on execution across land, power, permits, incentives, compliance and partnerships.