Damac and Vodafone triple Izmir data center budget to $300 million

The Izmir data center that Damac Digital and Vodafone Türkiye opened this week carries a $300 million price tag, triple the $100 million announced in 2024, and becomes Vodafone's second facility in the city and sixth in Turkey, where the operator counts more than 25 million mobile customers, millions of SMEs, and thousands of large enterprises as its addressable base. The spec sheet does more interesting work.

When the partners first floated the project in 2024, the carrier-neutral site was meant to open with 6MW across 13,500 square meters and expand to 12MW; the facility that actually came together starts at 4MW, spans 7,500 square meters, and fits more than 650 cabinets, with a stated ceiling of 20MW. That smaller first step and steeper eventual climb suggest the partners are following load rather than leading it.

The original plan assumed roughly 2.2 square meters per kilowatt in year one; the revised envelope works out to about 1.9 square meters per initial kilowatt, and the ultimate 20MW target would push density to around 2.7 square meters per kilowatt at full buildout. Doubling the final power draw while shrinking the physical plant means betting on denser, more powerful generations of IT gear in the second and third phases — an AI-era assumption that pays off only if customers show up.

Damac founder Hussain Sajwani frames the project as national competitiveness, and Vodafone Türkiye CEO Engin Aksoy points to cloud and data sovereignty. The strategic logic is less about flags than about anchoring: a data center underwritten by a telco with Vodafone's domestic customer base and enterprise relationships resembles contracted infrastructure plays elsewhere, where an anchor tenant's balance sheet gives the asset a financing floor. The expansion path from 4MW to 20MW is the part that will test that thesis.

The original delivery date was the first quarter of last year; the project has landed late and over budget, which is the norm rather than the exception in a market where transformers and grid connections are the real critical path. As this publication has argued, power and load rights have become the binding constraint on digital infrastructure — and here the constraint has had a price. Damac Digital, which started life in 2021 as Edgnex with a 12MW campus in Riyadh, is now doubling down on Turkey with a partner that brings both the power rights and the customer base. The 20MW end-state may come from Vodafone's existing traffic or from new anchor tenants that have yet to appear in the announcement.