Digital Realty enters Türkiye via joint venture with Rönesans
Digital Realty has formed a joint venture with Turkish infrastructure group Rönesans Infrastructure to develop and operate data centres across Türkiye, marking the NYSE-listed operator's first entry into the market. The partnership extends Digital Realty's PlatformDIGITAL brand into one of the few large European and Middle Eastern markets where the company had no established presence.
The joint venture's first investment is a carrier-neutral data centre campus in Ankara, designed to support more than 22 megawatts of IT load. Land, power and planning consent are already secured, and early construction has begun. The facility is scheduled for completion in 2028 and is intended to serve national enterprises, public-sector bodies and digital service providers, as well as international cloud and content platforms seeking in-country colocation.
The deal
Greg Wright, Digital Realty's chief investment officer, said the combination of Rönesans's local development capabilities and Digital Realty's global platform and customer base positions the venture to capture what both parties describe as strong and growing demand for cloud, AI and enterprise infrastructure in the country.
Beyond Ankara, the joint venture has stated plans to develop an additional facility in Istanbul, Türkiye's largest commercial and financial centre and its primary connectivity hub. The two-city strategy is designed to create a nationally resilient platform capable of serving both domestic customers and international operators routing traffic through the region. No capacity figures, timeline or cost estimate were disclosed for the Istanbul phase.
Rönesans Infrastructure, part of the broader Rönesans Holding group, has delivered more than $10 billion of private-sector investment in Türkiye and brings relationships with international institutional partners including the International Finance Corporation, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and a number of sovereign and corporate infrastructure investors. Dr Erman Ilicak, President Emeritus of Rönesans Holding, cited digital infrastructure as one of the most critical enablers of economic growth and framed the partnership with Digital Realty as consistent with the group's long-term approach to large-scale infrastructure development.
Market context
Türkiye's data-centre market has attracted growing attention from international operators over the past three years, driven by a large population base, rising cloud-adoption rates among domestic enterprises, and the country's position as a transit node for internet traffic between Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. The market has historically been served by a mix of local operators and a small number of regional players, with limited participation from the global hyperscale-adjacent platforms that dominate Western Europe.
Digital Realty's move follows a broader wave of EMEA expansion by large colocation operators. The company already has a growing presence across Southern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. Competitors including Equinix and regional specialists have also been assessing emerging markets along the same connectivity corridor, where power availability and planning timelines are often more favourable than in saturated Western European markets.
Regulatory and strategic read-across
Türkiye's digital infrastructure policy framework is shaped by data-localisation rules that require certain categories of personal data to be stored on servers physically located within the country. These requirements have historically acted as a catalyst for in-country data-centre investment by both domestic and international operators, and they are likely to remain a commercial driver for the new joint venture's enterprise and public-sector sales motion.
For Digital Realty, the Ankara campus extends a strategic arc that now runs from the Iberian Peninsula through Italy and Greece and into Türkiye, reinforcing the company's argument that its regional platform offers customers a single provider across a contiguous connectivity corridor. Investors will be watching for named customer commitments and a confirmed capacity scale for the Istanbul site as the primary near-term milestones.