What happened?

Vodafone Türkiye has opened the first phase of a data centre built with DAMAC Digital in İzmir's Gaziemir district. Commissioned with an investment of roughly $100 million, it is the company's sixth data centre in Turkey. Transport and Infrastructure Minister Abdulkadir Uraloğlu attended the opening.

The facility occupies 7,500 square metres of enclosed space and was completed in a year and a half. It starts operating with more than 650 cabinets and 4 MW of capacity. The infrastructure was planned so the investment can later rise to $300 million and total power capacity to 20 MW.

Technical specifications

  • Security and availability architecture conforming to the international Tier III standard.
  • Built with seismic isolator technology — a critical choice in an earthquake-prone region.
  • Infrastructure supporting next-generation GPU technologies and suited to running generative AI models.
  • Colocation services: organisations can host without building their own server estate, with 24/7 remote technical support.

Putting the number in scale

The "AI-ready" framing in the announcement is accurate but needs its bounds drawn. The capacity coming online today is 4 MW; the target at full build-out is 20 MW. Turkey's 2026-2030 AI action plan, meanwhile, targets 1 GW of national data centre capacity.

So at full capacity this facility covers about two percent of the national target, and today's first phase four tenths of one percent. The comparison is not meant to diminish the facility but to show the size of the goal: reaching 1 GW takes fifty facilities on this scale.

There is a second distinction. A 4 MW installation is meaningful capacity for enterprise hosting and inference workloads, but facilities where frontier models are trained are measured in hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts. This site strengthens Turkey's cloud infrastructure; it does not become a model-training centre. Those are different jobs.

The announcement's own numbers say a third thing. Divide 4 MW across 650 cabinets and you get roughly 6 kilowatts per cabinet. That is classic enterprise hosting density; a next-generation GPU rack alone draws tens of kilowatts. So the "GPU-supported" claim must apply to a dedicated section rather than the whole floor — how many cabinets are high-density is not stated.

Why İzmir?

Vodafone says İzmir's geography offers access both to enterprise customers across the Aegean region and to national and international connectivity networks. The site is the largest data centre in the Aegean, and the company's stated aim is to turn İzmir into a data centre hub on a Mediterranean scale.

What's next?

Vodafone, marking its twentieth year in Turkey, says it has made 600 billion lira in real investment to date and processes more than 100 petabytes of data a month across its infrastructure. No timetable for the second phase was shared; when the 20 MW target will be reached, and how much of that capacity will go to AI workloads, remains unstated.