Digital Realty buys a permitting queue in Turkey

For a colocation giant entering a new country, the concrete is rarely the hard part, and Digital Realty's first Turkish project, outlined this week, arrives with land, power, and permitting already secured and early construction under way — a sequence that explains why the company went in through a joint venture far better than the 22MW figure does.

The deal, reported by Data Center Dynamics, forms a joint venture with Rönesans Infrastructure, described in the announcement as one of Türkiye's largest investment companies, to develop and operate data centers across the country, beginning with a 22MW campus in Ankara where land, power, and permitting are already in place and construction has begun for a 2028 completion. Full terms were not shared, and the partners said only that a second site in Istanbul is intended.

Greg Wright, Digital Realty's chief investment officer, called Türkiye one of the most compelling emerging digital infrastructure market opportunities in the region and said the venture pairs Rönesans's development capabilities with Digital Realty's platform, customer relationships, and operating experience. Rönesans Holding, founded in 1993, works across construction, real estate development, energy, industrial facilities, and health, and its president emeritus, Erman ılıcak, said the group has delivered more than $10 billion of private sector investment in Türkiye while calling digital infrastructure one of the most critical enablers of growth, innovation, and technological progress. The relevant qualification for this deal is narrower: a partner who has already assembled the three inputs — land, power, permitting — that the Ankara campus no longer has to obtain.

The Turkish market Digital Realty is entering is crowded at home and thinly contested from abroad: Data Center Map lists 81 data centers across 17 markets, most of them in Istanbul with Ankara and Izmir as secondary hubs, and local operators own and run the large majority. Equinix is the most notable international presence, with several facilities around Istanbul, while Damac recently opened a site in Izmir alongside Vodafone, leaving Digital Realty among the international entrants in a market whose capacity remains overwhelmingly home-grown.

PWD has argued that consent now gates the data center buildout and that power rights have become an asset class, and Ankara tests both propositions: the announcement leads with land, power, and permitting because those inputs decide whether 2028 is a delivery date or a placeholder. A global operator can fund a campus almost anywhere; what it cannot quickly buy is a local position that shortens the permitting and interconnection queue, so the queue position is the thing being purchased and the joint-venture structure, not the megawatt count, is the decision that matters.

Joint ventures are the standard vehicle for this kind of entry for a plain reason: the global partner brings balance sheet, customers, and operating standards, while the local partner brings ground, relationships, and the ability to move a project through institutions it already knows. Sourcing and permitting are where first-time entrants most often lose years, and Rönesans has spent three decades doing precisely that work in Turkey, making the 22MW campus the visible output and the working relationship with a partner who clears institutional hurdles the asset under it.

There is a wrinkle for the capital-hierarchy argument, though. The Ankara campus is announced without a named anchor tenant, at least in the detail disclosed so far, and hyperscaler-anchored assets earn infrastructure pricing while unanchored capacity has to fund its own way. A 22MW first build with no disclosed customer is development risk carried on market demand, closer to a land-and-power option than a contracted asset. Market-entry ventures often work this way, with the partner's local relationships the plausible route to a tenant, but it leaves the underwriting resting on a demand forecast rather than a lease.

Istanbul is the next marker: the partners say a second Turkish site is planned there, in the city where the country's capacity and its international competition already sit. Watch the tenant as closely as the megawatts — an Ankara campus that signs an anchor before 2028 turns the joint venture into a platform, while one that opens on speculative demand prices Turkey like any unanchored build. What Digital Realty has bought is a way through the permitting queue; a tenant at the other end of it is not yet part of the announced deal.