Türkiye unveils $10 billion AI plan, targets data-center build-out by 2030

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Saturday unveiled a national artificial intelligence plan for 2026-2030 that aims to mobilize at least $10 billion, mostly from private investors, for data centers, cloud computing, and AI infrastructure, as Türkiye seeks to narrow the gap with larger players in a field increasingly framed around national sovereignty.

The plan was presented at the Türkiye Artificial Intelligence Summit, held at the historic Tersane-i Âmire shipyard in İstanbul, and published by the Presidency's Directorate of Communications. It sets targets rather than committed government spending: officials said the bulk of the headline figure is expected to come from the private sector.

"Political, military and economic power can no longer be considered independent of digital sovereignty," Erdoğan said, describing digital capacity as a "deterrent force multiplier."

The roadmap is built around four pillars the government labels "discover, benefit, produce and govern," each with four supporting actions.

The targets

Under the plan, Türkiye aims to raise installed data-center capacity to at least 1 gigawatt by 2030 and to allocate at least 2% of public investment programs to AI projects, with the state positioned as an early buyer of successful domestic systems. The government also plans a National Data Library offering at least 2,000 public datasets in areas including health, agriculture, defense, and e-commerce.

The plan calls for training 10,000 advanced AI specialists and 100,000 AI application professionals by 2030, alongside a national literacy program across all 81 provinces intended to reach 5 million citizens within two years. The aim, Erdoğan said, is to ensure "people of all ages understand artificial intelligence correctly and use it safely."

Domestic models

The strategy leans heavily on Turkish-language model development, which the government ties to its digital-independence goals. Erdoğan cited Bilge, a model under development by the state scientific and technological research council TÜBİTAK; a separate large language model built jointly by the T3 Foundation and drone manufacturer Baykar; and a nine-billion-parameter model running on defense firm HAVELSAN's platform.

Türkiye also plans to work with the Organization of Turkic States on a shared multilingual model spanning the Oğuz, Kıpçak, and Karluk language groups.

Courting investment

To attract foreign capital, the government said it would offer technology investors a "single-window" process delivering a roadmap within at most 30 business days, and would establish regulatory sandboxes in at least five priority sectors to test AI applications in a controlled environment. Implementation is to be overseen by a National AI Board, with the Industry and Technology Ministry tracking the plan's actions.

Erdoğan said he expected the added value generated by the resources mobilized under the plan to exceed ₺1 trillion. The Presidency did not publish a methodology for the estimate or a dollar equivalent; persistent inflation and the lira's depreciation make multi-year nominal projections difficult to assess.

Where Türkiye stands

The roadmap builds on Türkiye's first national AI strategy, which ran from 2021 to 2025. Officials say the country rose from 44th to 34th in global AI indices over that period. Erdoğan invoked a longer lineage as well, opening his remarks with the Turkish mathematician Cahit Arf, who asked in a 1958 lecture in Erzurum whether a machine could think.

The "tech sovereignty" language Erdoğan used echoes that of other governments seeking to reduce dependence on a small number of mostly US and Chinese developers, among them OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and China's DeepSeek.

A modest figure beside Europe's

Türkiye's $10 billion target is small relative to commitments elsewhere. At the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025, the European Commission launched InvestAI, an initiative to mobilize €200 billion across the bloc, including a €20 billion fund for up to five "AI gigafactories" (large compute hubs each envisaged with roughly 100,000 advanced processors). France separately announced about €109 billion (around $113 billion) in largely private and foreign-backed AI investment, which President Emmanuel Macron cast as France's answer to the US "Stargate" project.

Like Türkiye, Europe frames the spending around sovereignty and reducing reliance on non-European suppliers. Both also depend heavily on private money: the EU expects roughly 70% of gigafactory funding to come from private operators, and nearly half of France's pledged total is foreign-sourced.

Europe also illustrates the regulatory balancing act Türkiye is attempting. The EU AI Act, adopted in 2024, was the first comprehensive AI law from a major regulator, but Brussels has since moved to soften it. Under a "Digital Omnibus" deal agreed in May 2026, the bloc delayed its toughest obligations for high-risk systems to December 2027 and pushed back a requirement for member states to operate AI regulatory sandboxes to 2027, the same kind of testing zones Türkiye now says it will create.

That leaves Ankara promoting light-touch, investment-friendly rules at a moment when even the EU is easing its own, as governments compete to host infrastructure and talent. Whether Türkiye can convert its targets into the private capital and computing power the plan assumes will determine how far the roadmap carries the country in a race dominated by far larger economies.