Türkiye has set aside $1.6 billion for artificial intelligence work under a single incentive program, and it wants the private sector to put in far more.
The money runs through the HIT-30 High Technology Investment Program, which covers AI, data centers, chips and battery technology across the public sector, industry, healthcare, finance, defense and academia. Companies that qualify can claim tax incentives of up to 60 percent, grants covering up to 40 percent of an investment, financing on favorable terms for up to 70 percent, employment support, and market-development support of up to 20 percent.
That sits inside the Türkiye AI Action Plan, which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced on 13 June 2026. The plan aims to mobilize at least $10 billion, mostly private money, for data centers, cloud computing and AI infrastructure. The government expects it to add more than 1 trillion Turkish liras in economic value.
Smaller players get a different door. TÜBİTAK, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye, opened its 2026 AI Ecosystem Call, and each project can win up to 10 million Turkish liras (about $250,000). The cap excludes overhead, the project incentive bonus and the institutional share.
The grants target AI applied to smart manufacturing, agriculture and livestock, food, financial technology, e-commerce, climate change work and education. Applications run until 18 September through the TEYDEB Project Evaluation and Monitoring System. A separate Public AI Ecosystem Call funds R&D for public institutions for up to 48 months.
The Ministry of Industry and Technology coordinates the rollout with TÜBİTAK, its AI Institute, universities and research bodies, and says it will track the actions on a regular basis. The plan also calls for regulatory sandboxes in at least 5 priority sectors, a national AI growth fund, and a national AI council to oversee governance.
The energy side got its own headline the same week. IC Holding, a Turkish conglomerate, is working toward up to 20 small modular reactors in Türkiye and the wider region, in a strategic partnership with US-based ARC Clean Technology. Murad Bayar, who chairs IC Nuclear Technology, laid out the plan at the 12th Nuclear Power Plants Summit in İstanbul, held 30 June to 1 July 2026.
Long-term, the company sees up to 10 reactors inside Türkiye, with the regional total reaching 20. The design is the ARC-100, a 100-megawatt-electric-class advanced reactor built on sodium-cooled fast reactor technology, able to generate electricity and supply the high-temperature process heat that heavy industry needs.
Bayar framed the deal as joint development rather than an off-the-shelf purchase. "This is not a project to take a ready technology and install it in Türkiye," he said. "Our cooperation with ARC should be seen as a process of jointly maturing this technology from its current development stage, adapting it to different application areas, developing the supply chain, localizing equipment and making it suitable for the expectations of regulatory institutions."
He put the aim in one line: "Our goal is to establish an engineering and industrial ecosystem around reactor technology in Türkiye."
Türkiye is targeting 20 gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2050, with 5,000 megawatts of that coming from SMRs. Bayar said later reactors could land near $3,000 per kilowatt, which works out to roughly $300 million for a 100-megawatt unit. Final costs hinge on licensing, location, the supply chain and the project model.
The reactors are pitched at the places a strained grid struggles to serve: data centers, energy-intensive industry, organized industrial zones, petrochemical plants, mining sites, desalination, and regions where transmission is thin. Those are the same loads the AI build-out will create.