Turkey Plans AI Factories and Growth Zones With 25B Lira

Picture a 40-person software company in Ankara that wants to fine-tune a model on its own data. Today its options are a foreign cloud bill in dollars or nothing. The implementation details of Turkey's 2026-2030 AI Action Plan, reported by the state news agency Anadolu on August 29, are aimed at that company: "AI growth zones" with power, land and fiber already in place, shared-compute "AI factories" inside them, two public funds totalling 25 billion lira (roughly $600 million at current rates), and a voucher scheme for small firms.

The plan itself entered into force by presidential circular on August 18 with headline targets of 1 gigawatt of data-center capacity and $10 billion of infrastructure investment by 2030. What is new this week is the machinery meant to get there.

Zones, factories and a dated timeline

Growth zones are special-status areas with accelerated permitting and redundant high-capacity fiber. AI factories sit inside them, run on low-carbon electricity, and bundle large-scale compute with data spaces, model-development tooling, test environments, technical support and productization services, shared among several tenants. In plain terms: rented infrastructure for companies that will never build their own GPU cluster.

The schedule is unusually specific for a policy document. Within twelve months, the first zone is to be designated and anchor investors selected. By the end of 2027, at least one zone should be operating at first-phase capacity. By the end of 2028: at least five zones designated, three operational, three regional centers of excellence and six access points open, and 70% utilization of installed capacity. Locations have not been announced.

Where the 25 billion lira goes

Funding runs as a two-rung ladder. A National AI Research Fund of at least 10 billion lira covers basic and applied research and early-stage projects, with a target that at least 40% of supported projects reach pilot or prototype. An AI Growth Fund of 15 billion lira is to co-invest in at least 20 AI startups, aiming to mobilize two units of private capital for every unit of public money. The 2030 goals of $10 billion in mostly private investment and 1 gigawatt of installed capacity hang off this mechanism. The Ministry of Industry and Technology coordinates; the Treasury and Finance Ministry, the Strategy and Budget Office, TÜBİTAK (the national research council) and the sovereign wealth fund are also named.

The voucher, and the clock attached to it

For that Ankara software company the relevant line is the voucher. At least 1,000 AI vouchers are to be issued in the first twelve months. Targets: half of voucher-backed projects reach a pilot, a third of those become a lasting product or service, and pilots deliver at least a 10% gain in productivity or quality on average. There are deadlines baked in: no more than four months from trial to pilot, no more than six from pilot to product. On the export side the plan wants ten licensing or co-development deals, active partnerships in three priority markets, 25 enterprise deployments abroad and 100 million lira of model-export revenue by the end of 2028, plus 550 researchers trained in year one.

Reading it from outside Turkey

Turkey is joining a pattern already visible in Saudi Arabia's HUMAIN, the EU's gigafactory program and India's compute subsidies: sovereign compute offered as shared infrastructure rather than left to hyperscalers. The distinctive element here is the four-and-six-month clock on subsidized pilots, which addresses the most common failure of public AI programs, projects that never leave the pilot stage. The risk is on the other end of the timeline: bringing even one zone online by the end of 2027 assumes GPU supply that is tight everywhere. Application rules, voucher amounts and the list of eligible providers are still unpublished; for foreign vendors watching the Turkish market, those details will be the actual signal.

Sources: Anadolu Agency, TRT Haber, FinansınGündemi