Turkey's Trendyol to build 48MW data center in Ankara

Turkish e-commerce company Trendyol is to develop a data center in Ankara.

The company this week announced a partnership with UAE-based Castle Investments to build and operate a 48MW facility in the Turkish capital.

The facility is due to launch in Q3 2026, offering 9.6MW in the first phase.

“As well as helping us to better serve our growing domestic and international customer base, it reinforces our commitment to investing in Türkiye and our confidence in the country’s strong digital ecosystem,” the company said on LinkedIn.

Dome Group, which advised Trendyol as an exclusive financial advisor in this transaction, said the project would see around $500 million invested.

Dome added that Trendyol will use 40 percent of the data center’s capacity to power its expanding domestic and global digital operations, while the rest will be offered to cloud service providers and enterprise users.

Çağlayan Çetin, president of Trendyol Group, said: “Trendyol’s leadership is built on its world-class technological solutions and smart data applications. The Ankara Data Center project will significantly enhance the quality of service we offer to our rapidly growing local and international customer base, and represents further evidence of our commitment to investing in Türkiye and our confidence in the country’s strong digital ecosystem.”

Tarek Al Ashram, CEO of Castle Investments, added: “This partnership represents a major step forward in shaping the future of digital infrastructure in the region.

“Combining our extensive track record in delivering mission-critical data center facilities with Trendyol’s technological leadership and digital scale in Türkiye will make the Ankara Data Hub an iconic project and a new regional benchmark.”

Founded in 2010, Trendyol has more than 40 million customers globally. The firm is majority owned by China’s Alibaba.

Alongside Alibaba Cloud, Trendyol is a known Google Cloud customer.

The company also has existing on-premise operations. In tech blogs, Trendyol said it currently operates across seven data halls across three data centers – though it hasn’t shared details. Previous blogs said the company originally had one data center back in 2019, totaling 30 racks and 500 servers, but had grown to three facilities (known internally as Earth, Mars, and Venus) from three different providers by 2022.

Castle Investments is a privately held company owned by Tarek Al Ashram, who previously founded UAE firm Gulf Data Hub, a local operator which recently secured investment from KKR.

Early 2023 saw Trendyol’s majority investor Alibaba announce plans to develop a data center near Ankara in Temelli. Details on potential specifications or timelines of the data center were not shared – and, at time of writing, Alibaba Cloud doesn’t list a Turkish cloud region. It’s unclear if Trendyol’s announcement is linked to Alibaba’s previously announced plans.