Country profile: Turkey
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Turkey is the main player in terms of Eurasian connectivity hubs – by far the largest market covered in this guide in terms of population and connectivity industry size, and one that offers undeniable advantages for both hosting, processing and transiting data.
Data centres and AI
Turkey’s data centre market has seen big moves over the past year or two, and one noteworthy factor is geographical diversity of the builds. Istanbul las long been the home of Turkey’s data centre market, but space and power constraints are starting to bite. This opens opportunities for builds in Turkey’s other large cities, particularly Izmir and the Turkish capital Ankara.
There are specific attractive factors for both cities. As the seat of government, Ankara has a healthy demand for secure state-related storage, and it is a cooler city in general than Istanbul. Izmir has also benefited from its coastal location closer to European routes and landing points, although no subsea cables are currently connected to the city.
In Izmir, Vodafone and EDGNEX Data Centres, the data centre arm of Dubai investor DAMAC (known recently for a $20bn investment in U.S. digital infrastructure), will combine on a $100m project to build a 6MW facility, adding to Vodafone’s existing facility in the city. Ankara, meanwhile, will welcome a new 21 MW Tier III data centre build by Turkey’s satellite operator Türksat, due for completion in 2027.
On the AI side, Turkish AI legislative and planning frameworks are now kicking into gear, building on the progress made with the 2017 establishment of the Turkish Artificial Intelligence Initiative.
Digital transformation
Digital transformation in Turkey still has a long way to go – to illustrate, no international cloud provider currently has a cloud region in Turkey – but the charge to modernise connectivity infrastructure is primarily being led by the country’s operators.
Turkcell, for example, is undergoing a business transformation plan to use automation and AI to enhance operations, collaborating with Nokia to use machine learning and agentic AI, as well as making use of GenAI in call centres and also delivering 2,000 workflows to automate previously human tasks. Fellow carrier Turk Telekom has launched 5G-based smart agriculture, modernised its billing system, virtualised and disaggregated part of its broadband network.
Fibre
Turkey’s current fibre penetration stands at 27.7% - exactly the same level as the United States, incidentally – and there is potential to improve this. Increased levels of data centre construction will require fibre links and backhaul to connect them both to each other and to their target metro areas, and other markets have seen increased FTTH coverage following data centre construction activity. Much of Turkey’s geography is also favourable for fibre buildout, particularly between the largest metro areas in the west and centre of the country.
Internal connectivity market
Internally, Turkey’s communications market has grown handsomely in recent years, reaching a total size of $13bn in 2022, an increase of $4bn from the year before. The market has serious potential given the relatively low share of fixed broadband access, and the country’s numerous major carriers are all active in network development on both the wireline and wireless side, particularly around 5G rollout and OpenRAN technology.
Looking at the statistics, there is an imbalance between fixed broadband and wireless in favour of the latter. While there are 90 million+ users of mobile broadband internet via smartphones, there are 6.5 million FTTH subscribers, and fixed broadband penetration in the country stood at just under 23% as of the third quarter of 2023. This has remained fairly steady since 2021. On the business side, Turkish enterprises are increasing cloud adoption, with 2022 data from Deloitte showing that cloud platforms accounted for 15% of total enterprise IT spending.