Digital Realty is entering Türkiye through a joint venture with Rönesans Infrastructure, beginning construction of a carrier-neutral data-centre campus in Ankara as cloud providers, enterprises, and AI developers look for additional capacity along connectivity routes between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

The partners’ first project is designed to provide more than 22MW of IT capacity, with land, power, and permits already secured and early construction under way. Completion is scheduled for 2028, while the joint venture also intends to develop a further facility in Istanbul, creating a two-city platform aimed at domestic customers and international networks.

For Digital Realty, which operates more than 300 facilities across over 55 metropolitan areas globally, the move adds another market to an EMEA expansion strategy that has increasingly followed demand for cloud infrastructure and large-scale computing capacity into southern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. Rönesans brings local infrastructure development, construction, financing, and operating experience, reducing some of the execution risk involved in entering a market where power, land, permitting, and network connectivity must align before customers can deploy equipment.

Greg Wright, chief investment officer at Digital Realty, said: “By combining Rönesans’ deep expertise and development capabilities with Digital Realty’s global platform, customer relationships and operational experience, this joint venture is well positioned to support growing demand for cloud, AI and enterprise infrastructure while creating a strong foundation for long-term growth across Türkiye.”

Ankara adds capacity beyond the obvious hub

Istanbul is Türkiye’s commercial centre and an established landing point for international connectivity, but beginning in Ankara gives the venture access to demand from national enterprises, public-sector organisations, and digital-service providers while adding infrastructure away from the country’s dominant commercial hub. The planned Istanbul facility would subsequently give the platform a stronger connection to the country’s largest concentration of corporate activity and international networks.

Digital Realty describes Türkiye as a strategic corridor between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, with its geographic position making the country relevant to traffic flows as well as domestic computing demand. That position becomes more commercially useful as organisations place cloud, content, and AI workloads closer to users while maintaining multiple infrastructure locations for resilience and latency.

The 22MW figure places the first Ankara campus firmly in large commercial data-centre territory, although it remains below the scale of the biggest hyperscale campuses being developed for dedicated AI workloads. Carrier-neutral design is consequently important: rather than being constructed around a single cloud or technology customer, the facility is intended to host multiple enterprises, service providers, carriers, and platforms that can interconnect within the same site.

Such facilities are becoming part of a wider regional infrastructure contest as cloud adoption and AI increase demand for power-dense computing while network operators seek routes that reduce dependence on a small number of western European hubs. Southern Europe, the Balkans, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Türkiye offer potential alternative locations, although each market has to balance connectivity advantages against power availability, grid constraints, permitting, cooling requirements, and the economics of attracting anchor customers.

Local execution still decides data-centre expansion

Joint ventures have become a practical way for international data-centre groups to expand because the hardest constraints are often local rather than technological. Suitable land must have credible access to power and fibre, permitting can take years, and developers may need relationships with utilities, public authorities, construction groups, and institutional capital before the first server arrives.

Rönesans Infrastructure operates across transport, social infrastructure, renewable energy, and digital infrastructure, with more than three decades of experience developing and financing large projects. Its parent group says it has delivered more than $10 billion of private-sector investment in Türkiye, while existing international partnerships include companies and investors such as TotalEnergies, Meridiam, Samsung, and Sojitz.

Digital Realty contributes an international customer base and PlatformDIGITAL, its global data-centre and interconnection platform. That combination could help the Turkish facilities attract companies that already use Digital Realty elsewhere and want another location within the same broader provider ecosystem, particularly where cloud deployments or network architectures span several countries.

Demand is not guaranteed simply because AI is consuming more computing power, however, and the 2028 completion date leaves time for the infrastructure market to change considerably. Data-centre projects are capital-intensive, electricity supply has become a more visible political constraint across Europe, and developers increasingly have to demonstrate that new sites can secure enough grid capacity without worsening local infrastructure pressures.

The Ankara project nevertheless adds another marker to the eastward and southward expansion of Europe’s data-centre geography. If the Istanbul development follows, Digital Realty will have a platform capable of serving Türkiye as a sizeable domestic market while also using the country’s location as part of a broader network stretching through southeastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean.