Summary
- Digital Realty and Rönesans Infrastructure have formed a joint venture to develop and operate data centres in Türkiye.
- The first Ankara campus is designed for more than 22MW of carrier-neutral IT capacity.
- Land, power, and permitting are secured, early construction has begun, and the first facility is targeted for completion in 2028.
Digital Realty has entered the Turkish data-centre market through a joint venture with Rönesans Infrastructure, beginning with an Ankara campus designed to provide more than 22MW of carrier-neutral IT capacity.
The partners said land, power, and permitting are secured for the development and that early construction work has started. The first facility is scheduled for completion in 2028.
The joint venture intends to develop and operate further data centres across Türkiye, with Istanbul identified as the next target market. Digital Realty plans to integrate the facilities into its PlatformDIGITAL network.
The secured power position is one of the more consequential parts of the announcement. Across Europe, proposed capacity has increasingly run ahead of available grid infrastructure, leaving projects dependent on connection agreements, substation capacity, and network reinforcement long before servers can be installed.
Ankara sits outside Europe’s established hyperscale clusters but gives the venture access to Türkiye’s large public-sector, enterprise, and connectivity market. The country also occupies an important geographic position between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, with international traffic routes crossing the region.
The 22MW figure refers to IT capacity rather than total site consumption. The eventual utility requirement will be higher once cooling, power-conversion losses, lighting, pumps, controls, and other facility systems are included.
Digital Realty has not disclosed detailed cooling architecture, rack-density assumptions, capital expenditure, or the electrical topology planned for the Ankara facility. Those specifications will become increasingly important as the project moves through construction and customers begin to define the workloads it must accommodate.
AI infrastructure has altered the design envelope for new data centres. Accelerator-heavy deployments can concentrate several times the rack power of conventional enterprise workloads, requiring developers to plan electrical and mechanical systems around equipment that may not be selected until relatively late in the construction programme.
That creates pressure to build flexibility into switchgear, distribution, pipework, cooling loops, and heat rejection. A campus intended to serve cloud, enterprise, and AI customers has to avoid locking itself into one hardware generation while still controlling construction cost and avoiding overbuilding plant that may not immediately be required.
Rönesans provides local infrastructure and construction experience, reducing some of the execution risk involved in entering a new planning, contracting, and utility environment. Digital Realty contributes the operating platform, customer relationships, and interconnection model around which the campus is intended to develop.
The planned expansion into Istanbul could eventually give customers domestic geographic diversity between Türkiye’s political centre and its largest commercial and connectivity market. The announcement does not specify the location, capacity, investment value, or delivery timetable for that second development.
Digital Realty is expanding elsewhere in Europe at the same time. DataCentral reported earlier this month that the company had started work on a 15MW Zurich facility also targeting completion in 2028.
The projects illustrate two different expansion models. Zurich adds capacity to an established market and campus, while Ankara opens a new national platform with a local partner.
The latter carries a broader market-development task. Securing a viable site and grid connection removes two important barriers, but the partners still have to build the facility, establish carrier density, attract customers, and generate enough demand to support the proposed expansion into Istanbul.
The announcement gives the Ankara campus a clearer delivery basis than many early-stage data-centre proposals because land, power, and permits are already in place. The next test is whether construction can convert that position into more than 22MW of operating capacity by 2028 without the grid, equipment, and contractor constraints affecting projects elsewhere in Europe disrupting the programme.
