The bank's release on the signing says the money will add battery storage to the group's renewable platform by 2029 and develop a data centre powered by hybrid renewable energy. Leah Gutierrez, ADB's director general for Central and West Asia, said ADB helps mobilise long-term capital in sectors where long-term financing remains limited. İpek Ilıcak Kayaalp, chair of Rönesans, said the financing would help accelerate investments in renewable energy and digital infrastructure.

The project data sheet lists the Rönesans Corporate Infrastructure Loan Project, number 60163-001, as approved on 14 August 2026 from ADB's ordinary capital resources, under the information and communication technology sector.

A $375 million facility

ADB's loan is one part of a larger deal. The report and recommendation to ADB's board, dated July 2026, says it belongs to a five-year syndicated corporate facility of $375 million with a grace period of up to two years. The International Finance Corporation is lead arranger and commits up to $150 million. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, at up to $75 million each, and ADB are named as potential participants. On those figures ADB holds 20 per cent of the facility and IFC 40 per cent, on Backhaul's arithmetic.

The proceeds are for general corporate purposes, the paper says, with a focus on two parts of Rönesans' capital spending: wind power and battery storage within a pipeline whose size is redacted, and a hyperscale-ready data centre campus with advanced cooling, whose first phase is expected to have a capacity of 22 megawatts. The paper presents the loan as stable, long-term dollar funding that diversifies the group's funding base while domestic and regional markets are constrained.

What the bank will measure

The paper's results framework sets the targets. By 2029 at least 50 MW of wind capacity, 50 MWh of colocated battery storage and at least 22 MW of energy-efficient data centre IT load are to be installed. By 2030 at least 22 MW of IT load is to be available to tenants, with an annual power usage effectiveness of 1.30, 90 GWh a year of extra generation, emissions from the wind projects cut by at least 39,060 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, and at least seven operating jobs. A footnote says the data centre will be colocation-based and air-cooled and is expected to meet green building standards of at least LEED Gold equivalent. One of the stated assumptions is that a partnership with an experienced global data centre operator is maintained.

The paper does not name the site, the city or that operator. In September Digital Realty and Rönesans Infrastructure announced a joint venture for a campus in Ankara designed for more than 22 MW of IT capacity and due for completion in 2028, according to the US operator's release. The figures are close, but neither document links the ADB loan to that project, so the two cannot be treated as the same build on the published record.

Against the national target

ADB ties the project to the government's AI Action Plan for 2026 to 2030, which, the paper says, aims to take Türkiye's data centre capacity to 1 gigawatt by 2030 and draw $10 billion of private investment into data centres and other AI infrastructure. A 22 MW first phase is 2.2 per cent of that gigawatt, on Backhaul's arithmetic. The paper also gives the power context: gross electricity consumption rose 2.1 per cent to 360.9 TWh in 2025 and is projected at 455.3 TWh by 2030 under the national energy plan.

The signing came four days before Türk Telekom signed a $1 billion club loan for 5G and fibre. The ADB documents give no interest margin, no drawdown schedule and no split of the $75 million between energy and the data centre; the paper lists five linked annexes, client information and implementation arrangements among them, and none is published with it. The project data sheet lists an environmental and social action plan dated June 2026 as the only other published project document.

Read on Corridor Signal

The contracts came from two tenders, according to the disclosure to the Public Disclosure Platform: one to buy switches, routers and central control and management layer components for data centres, and one to buy network switches for the customer's branches. Netaş did not name the customer or give the delivery schedule or the split between the two contracts.

Five days later, ARD Grup said on 28 October that it had received an order from a private company for NVIDIA-based IT equipment to be used in the artificial intelligence infrastructure of a customer whose end user is in the United Kingdom. The order is worth US$662,400 including VAT, or TL 32,980,366, and ARD expects it to add to revenue and profit. Neither company named its customer. ARD's disclosure carried an English translation and says the Turkish text prevails if the two differ; Netaş published its notice in Turkish only. ARD gave the order's expected start as 27 October.

Alcatel Lucent Teletaş published its nine-month financial report on 27 October. Demand for GPU capacity in the region is covered in Corridor Signal's report on the Firebird export licence for 45,000 NVIDIA GPUs, and the cost of power for Turkish data centres in its analysis of large-user electricity charges.

The disclosures give contract values but no margins, so the effect on either company's results is not stated beyond ARD's expectation of a positive contribution.

Read on Corridor Signal

Ilyasov said the additions would be made up of 7.4 GW of base-load generation and 5.9 GW of renewable capacity, and that they would leave the country with a 20 per cent surplus of generating capacity. The government's release on the session names AI infrastructure and large data centres among the loads the new plants are meant to cover. It does not say how much of the 13.3 GW is meant for them, which plants would serve them or in which year each plant would come online.

A 27.1 GW system that used more power than it made

The power system now comprises 254 generating sources, 172 of them renewable, with total capacity of 27.1 GW, Ilyasov said. Coal-fired plants account for 13.7 GW, gas-fired plants for 7.1 GW and large hydroelectric plants for 2.5 GW. Last year generation reached a record 123.1 billion kWh, while consumption was 124.6 billion kWh.

Set against installed capacity, the plan would add the equivalent of about 49 per cent of today's system in a little over three years, on Corridor Signal's arithmetic. The release gives no figure for plants to be retired, so the net gain could be smaller.

The plan follows a shorter push for this year. At a government meeting on 13 October a deputy energy minister, Yerlan Akbarov, said Kazakhstan planned to commission about 2.4 GW of conventional capacity in 2026 to reduce the electricity deficit, and that output in the first nine months had reached 91.7 billion kWh, 102 per cent of the level a year earlier, against a full-year forecast of 126.5 billion kWh, the government said. Our report on the nine-month output set those figures against the country's data centre plans.

A 7.8 GW coal programme alongside renewables

Ilyasov also described a national project, "Development of coal generation", with investment projects totalling about 7.8 GW. It covers 19 projects: eight new plants with 5.3 GW and 11 expansion and modernisation projects with 2.5 GW. Among them are the Ekibastuz GRES-3 power station, a thermal plant in Kurchatov and three combined heat and power plants in Kokshetau, Semey and Ust-Kamenogorsk. The release does not say how much of the coal programme falls within the 2029 window, so the 7.8 GW and the 7.4 GW of base load cannot be compared directly.

On renewables, Ilyasov said their share of electricity output reached 8.5 per cent in the first nine months of 2026, against a target of 7 per cent. He cited auctions and large solar initiatives, among them a 300 MW plant by China Energy and Tumar Commerce projects of up to 1 GW, and said at least 8.4 GW of new renewable capacity was expected by the end of 2035, including about 1.8 GW of solar. Small distributed generation for businesses has grown fivefold since 2024 after legislative amendments, he added.

Data centres are a small share on official numbers

The government's most recent data centre capacity figures are far smaller than the generation plan. After a session on 6 October it said data centres with a combined 186 MW were planned for commissioning in 2027, followed by another 109 MW in the second quarter of 2028, and described the Data Center Valley project as having a capacity of at least 1 GW, in its account of the digital strategy session. We reported the 295 MW target at the time.

The 295 MW planned for 2027 and 2028 equals about 2.2 per cent of the 13.3 GW, by our calculation, and the 1 GW described for Data Center Valley would equal about 7.5 per cent. Generating capacity and a data centre's power draw are different measures: a plant's output varies with fuel, weather and maintenance, and the government gives no load factor for either.

Grid connection is a separate question. The national grid operator KEGOC is piloting a demand response mechanism, as our earlier report on the grid described, and the 29 October release does not discuss transmission lines or connection points for large users.

The two releases give three figures to test against later reports: from 29 October, 13.3 GW of new capacity by the end of 2029 and the 20 per cent capacity surplus that is meant to follow; from 13 October, the 2.4 GW of conventional capacity due this year.

Read on Corridor Signal

What officials have said

Rashad Hasanov, Deputy Minister of Digital Development and Transport, told the second Azerbaijan International Investment Forum in Baku that high-performance computing needs reliable energy, connectivity and physical space, and that the country has all three, Trend reported. He cited surplus generation of about 2 GW and an extensive fibre-optic network, and said the Alat data centre was in the final stage of negotiation after long discussions with numerous hyperscale data centre and cloud companies. He described the intended value chain as turning energy into computing power, then into AI and digital services and high-value exports. Report.az carried the same remarks and noted that no counterparty was named and that it was not stated whether a deal had been signed. Hasanov also said the migration of government information systems to the state cloud, G-Cloud, is continuing and is due to finish by the end of 2027, a step he described as important for the resilience of those systems.

The 2 GW figure echoes an earlier statement. At a meeting on the digital action plan on 11 February, President Ilham Aliyev said Azerbaijan has at least 2,000 MW of unused generation capacity out of a total of 10,000 MW, which he called a prerequisite for digitalisation, artificial intelligence and data centres. By Corridor Signal's arithmetic that is about 20 per cent of installed capacity. He also said transport and energy corridors should become fibre-optic corridors, and linked the energy demand of data centres to planned green energy cables. The record of that meeting gives no data centre capacity, project list or investment figure.

What documents show

The one project with published financing is state-owned. In December 2024 the European Investment Bank said its lending arm, EIB Global, had signed a EUR 43 million loan to AzInTelecom, its first loan to Azerbaijan's public sector. The money is for digital infrastructure for government services, including two new data centres in the Absheron and Hajigabul regions to provide cloud services, with completion planned for 2027. The release says AzInTelecom's existing data centres are in Baku and Yevlakh, that the operator was the first in the South Caucasus to receive Tier 3 certification, and that the new sites will use green technologies. It does not give their capacity in megawatts.

Interconnection data is thin. The Internet Society's Pulse tracker says no active exchange point is listed for Azerbaijan, and PeeringDB's public API, queried on 17 October, listed seven facilities, all in Baku. Both rely on voluntary records, and absence from them does not prove that an exchange does not operate.

What is not known

• the capacity, owner and operator of the Alat data centre, and whether any hyperscaler has committed;
• whether the roughly 2 GW of surplus generation can be delivered to a specific site, which depends on grid connections the statements do not describe;
• how the public sites in Absheron and Hajigabul relate to the Alat project, if at all;
• whether the action plan the president requested in February has been published with data centre targets.

Until a counterparty or capacity is disclosed, the Azerbaijani case rests on stated advantages rather than a contracted project. The first test is whether the Alat negotiations produce an announcement naming an investor and a megawatt figure.

Read on Corridor Signal

Armenia

On 10 February Firebird announced Phase Two of its Armenian project, an additional 41,000 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs and a $4 billion total, against a $500 million first phase. On 5 June it said the first phase would operate more than 6,000 Blackwell GPUs with a total power capacity of 18 megawatts and that a three-phase plan would scale beyond 100,000 GPUs by the end of 2027. The 15 June release repeated the 100,000 figure.

The 8 August opening release changed the end-2027 target. It said the Armenian roadmap would scale beyond 70,000 GPUs and expand the platform to 300 megawatts. It also said NVIDIA intends to invest in Firebird, following an earlier investment by CoreWeave, and gave no amount for either.

Firebird's website, retrieved on 17 October, lists three data centres. DC-1 in Armenia has 6,144 NVIDIA B200 GPUs across 15 MW. DC-2, described as the Phase 2 expansion in Armenia, has 75,000 VR200 GPUs across 125 MW. DC-3 is a planned site of 75,000 GPUs across 125 MW. The page gives totals of 150,000 GPUs and 300 MW.

Kazakhstan

The government said on 15 June that a planned $10 billion investment would create a cluster powered by 100,000 GPUs, that 300 MW of power capacity was already available and that the project was designed for phased expansion to 1 GW. It said the launch was planned for 2027, and estimated that the project would generate at least $3 billion in annual export revenue. Firebird's own 15 June release described strategic cooperation agreements and gave no dollar, GPU or megawatt figure for Kazakhstan.

On 8 August Firebird said it had secured 125 megawatts of AI infrastructure capacity at Data Center Valley, with approvals from the Kazakh government and export authorisation from the US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security. On 6 October the government again said a $10 billion package of agreements had been signed with Firebird AI and that Data Center Valley would have a capacity of at least 1 GW. Capacity reported that the first phase is a 125 MW facility valued at around $5 billion. The Times of Central Asia reported that an initial agreement between Kazakhtelecom, KT-Telecom and Firebird AI KZ on 2 October had an undisclosed amount.

Reading the numbers

By Corridor Signal's arithmetic, the three data centres on Firebird's site add up to 265 MW and 156,144 GPUs, against stated totals of 300 MW and 150,000. The page does not say where DC-3 would be. Its 125 MW matches the capacity Firebird says it has secured in Kazakhstan, but the page does not make that link. Phase 1 power is 15 MW on the website and 18 MW in the June release.

Several differences may reflect definitions rather than changes of plan: power available to a site, power allocated to a customer and IT load are different measures, and a GPU target for one country can differ from a platform-wide target. Firebird's global target is also given two ways, 2.5 GW worldwide by 2028 on the website and 2 GW by year end 2028 in the 8 August release. None of the documents reviewed reconciles them.

Two points remain open: which figures are commitments and which are ceilings, and whether the 125 MW DC-3 entry refers to the Kazakh site.

Read on Corridor Signal

The meeting, held to set tasks for the region's development, instructed officials to prepare a five-year programme and to provide investors with the 1 GW supply. The record sets two targets: 1,500 well-paid jobs within three years in Nukus, Kungrad, Karauzyak and Takhiatash, and annual exports of cloud technology and AI services of $600 million. It says the Kungrad-Karauzyak-Takhiatash axis is to become a "green industrial corridor", which it calls a triangle of the intellectual economy.

Gazeta.uz, which reported the remarks on 20 September, gave the same figures and named no companies. Neither account says how the $600 million export target was derived or from what base.

The projects named a day earlier

At a launch ceremony on 18 September, the president's office said projects with Chinese partners in Kungrad and Takhiatash districts cover the production of digital currency and the creation of AI data centres, at a total cost of $2.281 billion. The same record says a data centre will also be built in Takhtakupyr district, and that the first stage of a $150 million modular intelligent computing centre run by an enterprise called Linkwise has been launched in Takhiatash district. It does not name the Chinese partners, give the capacity of any facility or say how the $2.281 billion divides between digital currency and data centres.

By Corridor Signal's arithmetic, the $2.281 billion and $150 million figures add up to $2.431 billion, about 30 per cent of the $8 billion cited for the zone. Neither record says whether those projects are among the six, and the $8 billion is not itemised.

Power and context

The 18 September record also reports that construction of a 1.5 GW wind power plant in Kungrad district, a $2.6 billion project with the Saudi company ACWA, has entered its active phase. It lists 1,500 km of high-voltage lines and three new 500 kV substations as part of it. In Karauzyak district, two wind plants with a combined 300 MW and a 100 MW storage system have been commissioned.

Neither record says that either project is meant to supply the data centre zone, or how, when and at what tariff the 1 GW would be delivered. The rated capacity of a wind plant is not the same as the firm supply a computing campus needs, and the documents do not address how variable output would be managed.

The statement is one of several in recent weeks that tie Uzbekistan's data centre plans to power supply. On 22 September the digital ministry said Uztelecom's new data centres in Bukhara and Kokand connect to TAS-IX, the national traffic exchange point. On 8 October Mirziyoyev proposed that Central Asia and Azerbaijan start building a common computing infrastructure based on an interconnected network of national data centres. On 16 October the presidential record said reliable power supply must be arranged in advance for industrial plants and data centres, and Gazeta.uz reported that a map of grid connection capacity is due by 1 March 2027.

What to watch

• the five-year programme, and whether it states data centre capacity in megawatts;
• whether the developers and Chinese partners behind the $2.281 billion of projects are named;
• whether the wind and storage projects are formally tied to the zone's 1 GW commitment.

Read on Corridor Signal

The breakdown matters for data-centre investors because the three parts behave differently. Energy prices move with fuel, the wholesale market and the currency. Network charges are set through regulation and recover the cost of the grid, including the reinforcement that large new loads can need. Taxes and levies are a policy choice. A low total price that rests mainly on low network charges carries a different risk from one that rests on cheap generation.

The components, 2025

Euro per kWh, annual 2025, consumption band 70,000 to 149,999 MWh a year.

Method: every value in the table comes from Eurostat's dataset of electricity price components for non-household consumers (nrg_pc_205_c), annual data for 2025, in euro per kWh, for the 70,000 to 149,999 MWh band, as updated on 16 October 2026. The four columns are Eurostat's own component headings. A small residual category, other components and allowances, is left out of the table and discussed in the text; it is negative for Bulgaria. Georgia reports to Eurostat but its values for this band are recorded as zero, so it is excluded. Shares and cost estimates in the text are Corridor Signal calculations from the table.

Where Türkiye's advantage comes from

Excluding VAT, the components add up to about €0.0801 per kWh for Türkiye and €0.1493 for the EU in 2025, once Eurostat's small residual items are included. The gap of about €0.0692 splits roughly 42 per cent from energy and supply, 22 per cent from network costs and 36 per cent from taxes, fees and levies, on a Corridor Signal calculation. Lower energy costs are the largest single reason Türkiye's large users pay less, but more than half of the gap comes from the two regulated parts of the bill.

The structure of the Turkish bill is also different. Network costs make up about 3 per cent of the pre-VAT price for Türkiye's largest users, against about 12 per cent for the EU average and about 16 per cent in Germany and Ireland. Energy and supply make up about 79 per cent in Türkiye against 62 per cent for the EU. Bulgaria is the European case closest to Türkiye on network charges, at €0.0084, and its energy component is the highest share of any country in the table, after an allowance of minus €0.0087 that Eurostat records under other items.

For a data centre with 10 MW of IT load and a power usage effectiveness of 1.4, which uses about 122,640 MWh a year, the 2025 network component would come to about €0.33 million a year in Türkiye, €2.20 million at the EU average and €3.61 million in Germany. Taxes, fees and levies would add about €1.67 million in Türkiye and €4.75 million at the EU average. These are illustrations based on band averages, not quotes for a specific site.

The 2024 figures show the direction of travel. Türkiye's network component rose from €0.0019 to €0.0027 per kWh between 2024 and 2025, while its energy and supply component fell from €0.0726 to €0.0632 and its taxes, fees and levies fell from €0.0155 to €0.0136, according to the same dataset. The EU average network charge also rose, from €0.0162 to €0.0179. In both cases the regulated network share edged up while energy costs eased, a pattern worth watching as grid investment needs grow.

What could change

Each component carries its own risk. On the energy side, Türkiye's large-user price fell sharply in the first half of 2026 in both lira and euro, according to Eurostat's semi-annual series, which shows how quickly that component moves. On the network side, a low charge today says little about what a new connection for tens of megawatts will cost, or how long it will take, because connection costs for new sites are not part of these averages.

The tax line is the one governments control directly. In Germany it is the second-largest part of the bill for large users, at €0.0589 per kWh, while in Türkiye it is €0.0136. Changes to levies or charges for large consumers would show up in this column first. For investors comparing the corridor with established European hubs, the useful reading of the table is not only that Türkiye's total is low, but that its total is low for reasons that sit mostly with the regulator and the treasury rather than with the market alone.

Eurostat's next annual release of components will show whether the 2026 fall in Türkiye's total price came from energy, from the network or from taxes. Until then, the 2025 structure is the most recent official picture of what a large Turkish user's kilowatt-hour contains.

Read on Corridor Signal

Kazakhstan expects 126.5 billion kWh for the full year, Akbarov told the meeting. The same release says the country plans to add about 2.4 GW of conventional capacity this year to reduce what it describes as an electricity deficit. That is the power system into which Kazakhstan wants to place a new generation of data centres.

The government's stated target is 10 data centres of at least Tier III standard by 2030, with a combined capacity of around 20,000 IT racks, it said in a July 2025 statement. Set against the national power balance, the question for investors is less whether the electricity exists in aggregate than where, when and at what price it can be connected.

The power balance in the official record

Method: the first six rows come from the Kazakh government's release of 13 October 2026 on the energy sector's nine-month results, published in Russian and translated by Corridor Signal. The last two rows come from the government's English-language statement of 4 July 2025. The data-centre load scenarios in the text are Corridor Signal calculations from stated assumptions, not official figures.

What a data-centre build would add

The rack target does not translate directly into megawatts, because the government does not state a power density. As an illustration, 20,000 racks at 10 kW each would be 200 MW of IT load. At a power usage effectiveness of 1.4, that would draw about 2.45 billion kWh a year, or roughly 1.9 per cent of the 2026 generation forecast, on a Corridor Signal calculation. At 20 kW a rack the draw would double to about 4.9 billion kWh, or roughly 3.9 per cent. Either figure is small against national output, but not against the year's additions: the 7.8 billion kWh produced by renewables in nine months, or the 212.6 MW of renewable capacity commissioned so far this year, the release says.

Scale was also visible in earlier plans. In June 2024 a government release said Freedom Telecom had proposed building a data centre of at least Tier III for storing transit and international traffic, with its own investment of more than KZT 90 billion and completion by the end of 2027. That project is one of the 10 sites the 2030 target counts on, if it proceeds on that timetable.

Where the constraint sits

The release describes a system that is still adding capacity to catch up with demand. The 2.4 GW of conventional additions planned for 2026 include the modernisation of Almaty's CHP-2 and CHP-3 plants, a combined-cycle plant in Turkestan region and a new turbine and boiler at the Atyrau CHP; by mid-October a 240 MW combined-cycle plant in Kyzylorda region and 17 MW at the Tekeli energy complex were in service, the government said. The longer programme aims to add more than 26 GW of generation by 2035, the energy minister said in a government statement in July 2025, with projects totalling 10 GW already at various stages, a further 5 GW to come from modernising existing plants and 621.5 MW planned for commissioning in 2025. The October release adds that two more solar plants totalling 30 MW and a 3.2 MW hydro plant are due before the end of 2026.

For a data-centre developer, three things follow from the official numbers. First, a few hundred megawatts of IT load is a manageable share of national output but a large single connection, so location relative to new plants and the transmission grid will decide timelines. Second, renewable output is growing faster than the total, up 21 per cent in nine months, which matters to cloud customers with emissions targets but supplies only about 8.5 per cent of generation so far this year, a Corridor Signal calculation from the release. Third, the government itself uses the word deficit, which suggests new large loads will compete with industrial and household demand for the capacity coming on line.

The documents reviewed do not give a regulated tariff for data centres, a connection queue or the megawatts already contracted by data-centre projects. Those are the figures that would turn the national balance into a site-level business case, and the next disclosures to watch from the energy ministry and the grid operator.

Read on Corridor Signal

He made the proposal at the eighth Consultative Meeting of regional heads of state at Avaza in Turkmenistan, and said the infrastructure could be based on an interconnected network of national data centres. The text gives no capacity, budget, governance model or timetable.

The proposals

Mirziyoyev said artificial intelligence and big-data work are already changing industry, transport and energy, and that digital projects often deliver results faster than large infrastructure construction (translated from the Russian text). He said a shared network of data centres would allow computing capacity to be used more efficiently, support national digital products and create conditions for large AI projects. He also proposed joint sector training programmes, support for scientific projects and more opportunities for technology entrepreneurship. A separate summary from his office lists "common digital services and investment mechanisms" among the proposals on trade and investment.

Computing was one item on a broad list. The same speech proposed a regional alliance on critical minerals, digital monitoring of water resources and a coordinated transport and logistics network, so the computing network sits alongside several larger regional agendas. Neither document says which facilities would take part, who would operate or fund the network, how capacity would be allocated between countries or what technical standards would apply. Neither mentions satellite or fibre links between the countries.

President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev took a different approach at the same meeting, focused on governance rather than infrastructure. 24.kz said he proposed a Central Asian partnership programme on AI so that research centres, universities and technology companies can share information and experience. Trend reported that he said Kazakhstan has proposed a declaration on the responsible use of AI by the Central Asian states and Azerbaijan, and that the countries should begin developing joint approaches to control over critical technologies. Neither report links to a transcript from the Kazakh presidency, and neither mentions data centres.

The national baselines

The countries are at different stages. Kazakhstan's government said on 6 October that it plans to commission 186 MW of data centres in 2027 and a further 109 MW in the second quarter of 2028, and that its flagship Data Center Valley in Ekibastuz would have a capacity of at least 1 GW. In Uzbekistan, Mirziyoyev said on 19 September that six projects worth $8 billion would be carried out in a special zone for AI and data centres in Karakalpakstan, and the digital ministry said on 22 September that Uztelecom's new data centres in Bukhara and Kokand connect to TAS-IX. Azerbaijan's deputy digital development and transport minister, Rashad Hasanov, told an investment forum that talks on a data centre in the Alat free economic zone were nearing completion, Report.az reported, without naming a counterparty.

Interconnection is uneven. The Internet Society's Pulse tracker says 97 per cent of active networks in Tajikistan can exchange traffic through a local exchange point, against 73 per cent in Kazakhstan and 22 per cent in Uzbekistan. It lists no active exchange in Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan. The measure shows reach, not the data centre links a shared computing network would need, and it relies on self-reported records.

An idea with no capacity, budget or timetable

The proposal is at the stage of an idea put to leaders. The items to track are:

• whether the other governments respond to the computing proposal in a joint statement or follow-up working group;
• whether Uzbekistan attaches capacity or funding figures to it, for example through the Karakalpakstan zone;
• whether Kazakhstan's AI partnership and declaration are merged with it or run in parallel.

Read on Corridor Signal

Both prices are for consumers using 70,000 to 149,999 megawatt-hours a year and exclude VAT and other recoverable taxes. Türkiye's price was down from €0.0702 in the second half of 2025, and for anyone pricing a data centre in the corridor the gap with the EU average is the widest in the semesters published since 2024.

The band is the one a mid-sized data centre falls into. A facility drawing 10 MW for its IT equipment at a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.4 uses about 122,640 MWh a year. At Türkiye's first-half average its annual power bill would be about €5.96 million, against €14.86 million at the EU average and €22.06 million at the Irish average, on a Corridor Signal calculation from the Eurostat figures. The PUE of 1.4 is an assumption for illustration; a more efficient site would use less power and a less efficient one more, but the ratios between countries would not change.

Taxes do not close the gap. With all taxes and levies included, the Turkish price in the larger band was €0.0581 per kWh in the first half of 2026, against €0.1461 for the EU, €0.1794 for Germany, provisionally, and €0.1414 for Bulgaria, the same Eurostat release shows. On that basis Türkiye stood at about 40 per cent of the EU average, the same ratio as before tax.

The numbers

Euro per kWh, excluding VAT and other recoverable taxes and levies.

Method: every price in the table comes from Eurostat's bi-annual dataset of electricity prices for non-household consumers (nrg_pc_205), in euro per kWh excluding VAT and other recoverable taxes and levies, as updated on 16 October 2026; German first-half figures are flagged provisional by Eurostat. Bulgaria and Romania are included as Türkiye's Black Sea neighbours, and Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland as established data-centre markets. Georgia, which also reports to Eurostat, is excluded because the dataset records zero in both bands for the recent semesters. The lira figures in the text come from the same dataset in national currency. The cost model above is a Corridor Signal calculation, not a Eurostat figure.

How much of the fall is the lira

Most of Türkiye's decline happened in lira terms. In national currency the price in the 70,000 to 149,999 MWh band fell from 3.3971 lira per kWh in the second half of 2025 to 2.532 lira in the first half of 2026, a drop of 25.5 per cent, the Eurostat series shows. In euro the drop was 30.8 per cent, so the weaker lira added about five percentage points. The two series imply that Eurostat's conversion rate moved from about 48.4 to about 52.1 lira per euro between the two semesters, a Corridor Signal calculation. In the smaller band, 20,000 to 69,999 MWh, the price fell 21.3 per cent in lira and 26.8 per cent in euro.

The first-half figure is also the lowest Turkish value in the series shown. In the larger band Türkiye's price was €0.0754 in the first half of 2024, €0.0793 in the second half of 2024 and €0.0726 in the first half of 2025, the dataset shows. Eurostat's table does not give the reasons for the fall. They would sit in the regulator's tariff decisions and wholesale market prices, which the table does not break out, and a single semester is a thin basis for a long-term power contract.

What the averages do not capture

The figures are averages of prices paid by consumers in each band, including energy and network costs. A data-centre operator buying through a bilateral contract or a power purchase agreement may pay more or less than the band average, and a new site may face connection costs and grid-capacity limits that no price table shows. Carbon intensity, which matters to cloud customers with emissions targets, is also absent from these data.

The policy ambition is stated. Turkcell and Google agreed in November 2025 to invest a combined $3 billion in Türkiye's first hyperscale cloud region, with Google committing $2 billion over 10 years and Turkcell planning $1 billion, according to the Investment Office of the Presidency. At the same event the industry and technology minister, Mehmet Fatih Kacır, said: "With the accelerating impact of our support mechanisms, we will mobilize USD 10 billion in data center and AI investments by 2030."

On Eurostat's numbers, power is one input where Türkiye's case is strong. Whether the first-half level holds is the question for anyone signing a ten-year lease. Bulgaria, the cheapest of the EU comparators, was close to the EU average at €0.1179, and Romania was above it at €0.1479, which leaves Türkiye's large users paying well under half of what their nearest EU neighbours paid for the same band.

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The release does not mention data centres. The project is run by KEGOC with support from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the consultancy Elia Grid International organised the workshop, according to KEGOC. It said the main goal is to see how adjusting consumption during peak hours can serve as an extra resource, and that the approach will help manage demand during power shortages, make the National Grid more reliable and lower the need to import electricity from neighbouring countries. Experts will outline a design for the system and prepare proposals for a full launch. The release does not say which consumers would take part or give a timetable.

The system the new load joins

KEGOC told the government on 25 August that it forecasts peak demand in the Unified Power System at around 18,200 MW this autumn-winter, 480 MW or 2.7 per cent more than a year earlier. It expects consumption to rise by 2 billion kWh and generation by 2.1 billion kWh, without stating the period for those two figures. In the Southern zone, which received particular attention, peak load is forecast at 5,100 MW, 700 MW more than last winter. Generation within the zone, including new capacity due to come online, should reach some 2,800 MW, with the balance carried over the North-East-South transit lines.

On 14 August, KEGOC said, a system disturbance left the Southern zone of the Unified Power System and the Integrated Power System of Central Asia "separated into islanded operation", and consumer load of about 2,810 MW was shed. Its preliminary operational data pointed to a sudden power surge from the Central Asian system as the cause. The 500 kV Shu-Zhambyl and Zhambyl-Shymkent lines and the western interconnection are slated for completion in 2027, and the Almaty-Zhambyl section is to rise from 1,100 MW to 1,500 MW of transfer capacity.

What the data centre plan adds

The government says it plans to commission 186 MW of data centres in 2027 and a further 109 MW in the second quarter of 2028. Its flagship, Data Center Valley in Ekibastuz, has secured power supply from the GRES-1 plant, the same account says. Ekibastuz is in the Pavlodar region, not in the Southern zone that KEGOC singled out.

For scale, by Corridor Signal's arithmetic, 295 MW is about 1.6 per cent of the 18,200 MW winter peak forecast, and the 186 MW due in 2027 is about 39 per cent of the 480 MW year-on-year rise in forecast peak. The comparison is rough. Data centre figures are installed capacity, forecast peak is a system measure, and a facility may not draw its full rating when the system peaks. The Times of Central Asia calculated in July that a 250 MW complex running continuously would use about 2.19 billion kWh a year, roughly 1.8 per cent of Kazakhstan's 2025 electricity use. On the same basis 295 MW would use about 2.6 billion kWh, similar in size to the 2 billion kWh increase KEGOC forecasts.

The government separately reported that a 90 MW "strategic digital mining" facility, using associated petroleum gas, was launched on 12 September. The Times of Central Asia said the DC Market Insights tracker counted 27 operating data centres with about 30.7 MW of capacity on 7 October.

Eligibility and supply remain unanswered

Neither KEGOC nor the government has said whether data centres would be eligible for the demand response scheme or how the first Ekibastuz facilities would be supplied beyond the GRES-1 reference. The items to track are:

• the design proposals that follow the pilot, and whether they cover large computing loads;
• whether the 500 kV reinforcement projects reach completion in 2027 as scheduled;
• whether KEGOC's next forecast includes data centre connections as a separate line.

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The statement is the company's own. The release carries no quote from NVIDIA and no benchmark values.

The release says the recognition followed technical evaluations conducted with NVIDIA's engineering team. It does not name the workloads, state the size of the cluster tested, give the date of the tests or say whether anyone outside the two companies verified the results. It describes the site as having gone from an empty, snow-covered plot to a high-performance facility in six months, and puts the achievement at less than 10 months from that starting point.

Firebird's website, retrieved on 17 October, lists its first Armenian data centre as 6,144 NVIDIA B200 GPUs across 15 MW. In a 5 June release the company said the first phase would operate more than 6,000 Blackwell GPUs with a total power capacity of 18 megawatts, at an investment of $500 million. It opened the site near Hrazdan on 8 August and named Perplexity as one of its first customers, which it said would use the infrastructure for its answer engine and digital coworker platform.

The 8 August release did not give a utilisation figure or say how much of the first phase is in commercial use. The 12 October release does not either.

The first phase is the smaller part of what the company has announced. In February it said a second phase would add more than 41,000 NVIDIA GB300 GPUs and bring the project to about $4 billion. On 8 August it said NVIDIA intends to invest in Firebird, following an earlier investment by CoreWeave, and gave no amount for either. The 12 October release limits the new status to training workloads on B200 GPUs, the first-phase hardware, and says nothing about the later phases.

The company has not said whether it will publish the evaluation results. The items to track are:

• whether NVIDIA publicly confirms the status and the workloads it covers;
• whether Firebird publishes benchmark data for the cluster;
• how much of the first phase is under contract beyond Perplexity.

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Pulse lists no active exchange point in Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan.

What the figures show

Pulse counts a network as covered if it is a member of an IXP or a customer of a member. The tracker uses PeeringDB, which it describes as based on self-reported data from IXPs and their members, and it lists only exchanges with three or more members. The measure shows reach, not traffic volume. The denominators also differ widely: one exchange can cover most of Tajikistan's 38 active networks, while Türkiye's figure is taken across 881.

• Tajikistan: 97 per cent of 38 active networks, through one exchange, TJ-IX in Dushanbe, with 21 members.
• Kyrgyzstan: 92 per cent of 61, through two exchanges, led by KG-IX in Bishkek with 22 members.
• Armenia: 75 per cent of 131, through ArmIX in Yerevan, with 34 members.
• Kazakhstan: 73 per cent of 218, through 14 exchanges.
• Türkiye: 63 per cent of 881, through six exchanges, including DE-CIX Istanbul with 70 members.
• Uzbekistan: 22 per cent of 108, through two exchanges.
• Georgia: 21 per cent of 152, through IXP.ge, with 14 members.

Gaps and discrepancies

Kazakhstan lists the most exchanges, but 12 of its 14 carry the KAZ-GOV-IX name, with nodes from Astana to Aqtau. Pulse puts Astana at 15 members and Almaty at 10, with the ten other nodes at between three and six. PeeringDB's facility record for KAZ-GOV-IX in Astana names JSC State Technical Service as the organisation. The other two exchanges, KazNIX and KAZ-IX, list 12 and six members. Pulse's headline gives 29 combined members for Kazakhstan, while its per-exchange counts sum to 83. The page does not explain the difference.

The same mismatch appears elsewhere. Türkiye's six exchanges list 121 members when their counts are added, against a stated total of 100, and Uzbekistan's stated total of 21 compares with 18 listed. A network that joins several exchanges could account for a lower total, but not for Uzbekistan's, where the stated figure is the higher one. Readers should treat the member totals as indicative and the coverage percentages as the tracker's headline measure.

Uzbekistan's 22 per cent rests on SNS-IX, which Pulse lists with 18 members, and UZ-IX, which it lists with none. PeeringDB's own record for UZ-IX shows five networks. Its Uzbek exchange listings are SNS-IX, UZ-IX and ITI-IX, and TAS-IX is not among them. The digital ministry says Uztelecom's new Bukhara and Kokand data centres connect to TAS-IX, the national internet traffic exchange point.

Georgia's 21 per cent rests on IXP.ge, which Pulse lists with 14 members at two physical locations. For Azerbaijan, Pulse's page says no active exchange is listed in PeeringDB. Absence from a voluntary database does not prove that no exchange operates, and Pulse excludes exchanges with fewer than three listed members.

Colocation listings

PeeringDB's public API, queried on 17 October, listed 49 facilities in Türkiye, nine in Armenia, seven each in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, five in Georgia, two in Kyrgyzstan, one in Tajikistan and none in Turkmenistan. All seven Azerbaijani listings are in Baku.

In Türkiye, the listing with the most networks present is MedNautilus Istanbul, listed under Telecom Italia Sparkle, with 50 networks, followed by Equinix IL2 in Istanbul with 48. The largest Kazakh listing, KazNIC in Semey, shows six.

The records count networks present, not megawatts or floor space, so they cannot be set against the capacity targets that governments publish. They also depend on operators registering themselves, which means a thin listing can reflect reporting habits as much as the market.

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The target is large against the existing market. DC Market Insights tracked 29 data centres in Kazakhstan as of 7 October, of which 27 were operating, with operating capacity of about 30.7 MW, The Times of Central Asia reported. On those numbers the plan implies close to ten times the capacity now in service within roughly 20 months. The target figures come from the report of Zhaslan Madiyev, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, as summarised by the government press service.

Where the capacity is meant to come from

The government's flagship is Data Center Valley in Ekibastuz, in the Pavlodar region, which it describes as a project with a capacity of at least 1 GW. It said land had been allocated, an operator identified, engineering infrastructure and power supply from the GRES-1 power station secured, and construction of the first facilities begun. The account of the session does not break the 186 MW and 109 MW tranches down by project.

Capacity reported that the anchor is a 50 MW AI-focused facility being built by the state operator Kazakhtelecom, due for commissioning by June 2027, with excavation reported 90 per cent complete in August. The same report put the first phase of the Firebird programme at a 125 MW facility valued at around $5 billion.

The US company Firebird is the main foreign partner. In June the government announced a $10 billion package of agreements covering a cluster of 100,000 GPUs, with 300 MW of power available and expansion planned to 1 GW. Its own account lists two signed documents: a strategic cooperation agreement between the ministry and Firebird, and a binding term sheet between Kazakhtelecom and Firebird covering technical and organisational parameters. Nvidia attended but is not listed as a signatory.

On 2 October Kazakhtelecom, its subsidiary KT-Telecom and Firebird AI KZ signed an initial agreement on the construction and long-term leasing of computing infrastructure, The Times of Central Asia reported, adding that the amount for construction and equipment has not been disclosed. Capacity cited the Caspian Policy Center as noting that the Astana agreements did not include binding investment.

Other projects and interest

Madiyev's report said more than 20 international technology companies and investors had shown interest. Capacity listed London-based JMOT04, which signed a memorandum in May for a Tier IV data centre costing up to $1.5 billion, Singapore's GK Hyperscale, which is building two data centres in the Akmola and Karaganda regions, and China's SuperX AI, which is considering a 1 GW cluster. Singapore-based Energy Capital Global, which is considering a campus with an initial phase of about 100 MW expandable to 1 GW, signed a memorandum with KT-Telecom in August, The Times of Central Asia reported.

Power is the constraint to watch

The Times of Central Asia estimated in July that a 250 MW complex running continuously would use about 2.19 billion kWh a year, roughly 1.8 per cent of Kazakhstan's 2025 electricity use, and noted that thermal plants generated 74.4 per cent of the country's electricity in 2025. It also reported that the first Ekibastuz centre is to draw on an existing 215 MW substation.

The same 6 October report said a "strategic digital mining" facility with 90 MW of capacity was launched on 12 September, using associated petroleum gas.

The milestones to watch, as set out by Capacity, are:

• whether the Firebird framework converts into committed capital;
• whether power and grid upgrades keep pace with construction;
• whether the first 50 MW is commissioned by June 2027.

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The post says the visit coincided with a signing ceremony at the presidential palace for Firebird's investment agreement with the government of Kazakhstan. It gives no licence number, issuing agency or conditions, and no value or terms for the agreement. Neither document is public in the material reviewed for this piece.

According to the post, the first phase of Firebird's Kazakh project is under construction with Kazakhtelecom at Data Center Valley, targeting commercial launch in the third quarter of 2027, and a planned second phase would bring Firebird's total potential AI infrastructure capacity in Kazakhstan to approximately 500 MW. That is four times the 125 MW at which a 6 October report by Capacity put the first phase of the Firebird programme, and above the 300 MW of power that the government said in June was available there, as Corridor Signal has reported. The post does not say whether the 500 MW is power at the site or IT load, or when the second phase would start.

The post also gives figures for Kazakhtelecom, which it describes as the country's largest telecommunications company. The operator has deployed 400 Nvidia H200 and 480 Nvidia B300 GPUs in Astana and Almaty. Next year it plans to deploy more than 1,000 GPUs in Data Center Valley and more than 1,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs in the Ekibastuz region. The post does not say how the installed GPUs divide between the two cities, which model the Data Center Valley batch would use, or whether either batch is part of Firebird's capacity.

What the presidency recorded

The presidency's account of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev's meeting with Huang at the Akorda names the partners but not the deal. It quotes Huang as citing partnerships with Firebird AI KZ Ltd and Kazakhtelecom, and as saying that "this new industry requires energy at its foundation". It records his proposal that Kazakhstan become a global hub for physical AI, and says Tokayev awarded him the Order of Dostyk of the first degree for his contribution to AI development in Kazakhstan. It does not mention the Firebird signing, an export licence or any capacity or investment figure.

At a public fireside chat with Zhaslan Madiyev, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development, Huang said the country could "transform energy into intelligence and export intelligence", Nvidia's post reported. Tokayev also welcomed Nvidia's partnership with Higgsfield, a Kazakhstan-founded start-up in which Nvidia announced an investment during the visit, without giving an amount.

Madiyev's ministry, as reported by El.kz, said Data Center Valley is planned in phases to a total power capacity of up to 1 GW and that the full 215 MW of its first phase is already reserved. It did not say who holds the reservation or how it relates to Firebird's first phase. Nationally, the government plans to commission 186 MW of data centre capacity in 2027 and a further 109 MW in the second quarter of 2028, as reported earlier.

Other compute plans

Timur Turlov, chief executive of Freedom Holding, said the company was placing an order for its first Nvidia B300 computing cluster, with a public GPU cloud for businesses and developers planned for 2027, The Times of Central Asia reported. The publication said Freedom is building the Akashi data centre campus in Astana with a planned capacity of up to 100 MW, and that Freedom's August regulatory filing described its $2 billion sovereign AI hub arrangement with the ministry as non-binding and said the project would require substantial financing. It also reported that Firebird's Kazakh unit would finance the computing hardware and related systems.

Nvidia's post names Firebird as the holder of the licence. None of the documents from the visit says which end users the licence covers or what conditions attach to it. Firebird already runs an AI factory on Nvidia B200 GPUs in Armenia, which it said on 12 October meets at least 95 per cent of Nvidia's reference performance for the training workloads evaluated, as Corridor Signal has reported.

The next dated step in the documents is the commercial launch of Firebird's first phase in the third quarter of 2027. Kazakhtelecom's plan to deploy more than 2,000 GPUs in and around Ekibastuz is set for next year, by Nvidia's account, while the licence conditions and the terms of the investment agreement remain unpublished.

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What the release says

The venture brings Digital Realty's PlatformDIGITAL offering to Türkiye to serve demand for cloud, AI, connectivity and enterprise infrastructure, according to the release. It says the Ankara campus is intended for national enterprises, public sector organisations and digital service providers, and that the partners plan a further data centre in Istanbul. They expect the two sites to operate as a connected platform. The release describes the venture as extending the company's footprint across South-Eastern Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean and the corridor linking Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Greg Wright, Digital Realty's chief investment officer, welcomed the partnership with Rönesans Infrastructure to establish the company's presence in Türkiye, the release says. Paula Cogan, managing director for EMEA, called the expansion a key milestone in the company's regional growth strategy. Erman Ilıcak, president emeritus of Rönesans Holding, said Rönesans has delivered more than $10 billion of private-sector investment in Türkiye. The release describes Digital Realty as operating more than 300 facilities in over 55 metros, and Rönesans as one of Türkiye's largest investment companies with multilateral lenders including IFC and the EBRD among its long-term partners. It does not state the Istanbul site's capacity, location or timetable. Data Center Dynamics likewise reported that the ownership stakes and the Ankara site address were not disclosed.

How it compares

The Ankara figure is large against the first phase of the most recently opened project in the country. DAMAC Digital and Vodafone Türkiye said on 7 September that their Izmir site opened with 4 MW and a plan to scale to 20 MW, at about $100 million for that facility. By Corridor Signal's arithmetic, 22 MW is 5.5 times the Izmir opening phase and 10 per cent above its planned final size, although the Ankara figure is described as capacity the campus is designed for, not what will be energised at completion.

Another Ankara project is already announced. Data Center Dynamics reported in May 2025 that the retailer Trendyol and the UAE firm Castle Investments planned a 48 MW data centre in Ankara, with 9.6 MW in the first phase and a launch due in the third quarter of 2026. Corridor Signal found no announcement confirming that it has opened. At the hyperscale end, the Investment Office of the Presidency said in November 2025 that Turkcell and Google Cloud would invest a total of $3 billion in a hyperscale cloud region.

The existing base

Data Center Dynamics, citing Data Center Map, said Türkiye has 81 data centres across 17 markets, mostly in Istanbul, with Equinix the most notable international operator. PeeringDB's public API, queried on 17 October, listed 49 colocation facilities in Türkiye. Both counts rely on voluntary or third-party listings, and neither measures megawatts, so they cannot be set against the 22 MW figure.

The release does not name an anchor tenant or say whether any of the Ankara capacity has been pre-leased. The items to track are:

• whether the partners disclose investment and ownership terms;
• the capacity and site of the Istanbul data centre;
• whether the Ankara campus holds to its 2028 completion date.

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The outages illustrated a point the Kazakh digital ministry made in its response: that key computing operations for local users are performed abroad.

Yandex Cloud said in a status message that a drone attack had damaged infrastructure at Yandex's data centre in Vladimir and that the data centre's operation was completely stopped. The message, posted on the Yandex Cloud alerts channel, reported no casualties, called the remaining resource configuration unstable and said the platform was running in emergency mode. It advised customers to use any alternative disaster recovery plans they had. Later updates on the same channel listed compute as available in two of its zones, storage as read-only and some services as unavailable.

Kursiv reported that a drone strike and fire shut down a Yandex data centre in Sasovo, in the Ryazan region, on 8 October, that a strike damaged the Kaluga data centre on 9 October, and that the Vladimir facility came under attack overnight into 11 October.

Kazakhstan

On the morning of 11 October the Yandex Go ride-hailing service and the Yandex Eda and Yandex Lavka delivery apps temporarily stopped working in Almaty, Kursiv reported. The Astana Times reported on 12 October that users across the country, especially in Almaty and Astana, struggled to book rides, that services had resumed, and that Yandex was still working to stabilise performance without a firm timeline for full recovery. Arsen Tomsky, founder and chief executive of the rival service inDrive, wrote on Threads that it had seen a "sharp influx of passengers and orders", the Astana Times reported.

Kazakhstan's Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development said servers holding Kazakh users' personal data were operating normally in the country, but stressed that data localisation does not make a platform independent of foreign infrastructure, the Astana Times reported. Kursiv summarised the ministry's position as being that personal data is stored on servers inside Kazakhstan while key computing operations are performed abroad. The ministry said it was working with Yandex and Kazakh infrastructure organisations and coordinating with other taxi and delivery platforms to help them handle higher demand, the Astana Times reported.

Uzbekistan

Gazeta.uz reported that Yandex Go was disrupted in Uzbekistan for several hours on the morning of 11 October, with users unable to see fares or place taxi orders, while Yandex Maps and Navigator worked normally. It said the attack on the Ryazan facility on the night of 8 October had earlier disrupted Uzum Market, which it described as Uzbekistan's largest online marketplace, with service restored on the morning of 10 October.

Yandex Uzbekistan's press service said some services "may currently experience errors or be temporarily unavailable". The company said complex services rely on distributed infrastructure, so a failure in one country can affect functions in another, and that it operates in compliance with Uzbek law, Gazeta.uz reported. The Times of Central Asia noted that the strikes disrupted taxi and delivery services in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Local capacity and the localisation question

Kursiv quoted analysts at Teniz Capital as saying that Yandex has not announced plans to relocate its computing operations to Kazakhstan, but that the disruption has given the regulator grounds to demand that those processes be localised. Kursiv also reported that Kazakhtelecom, the largest telecoms operator, holds a 47 per cent share of the commercial data centre market, that its facilities are about 95 per cent occupied with more than 1,700 server racks and combined capacity of approximately 25 MW, and that it is negotiating with more than 20 major prospective customers.

Those operator figures sit alongside a different tracker's count. DC Market Insights listed 27 operating data centres in Kazakhstan with about 30.7 MW of operating capacity as of 7 October, The Times of Central Asia reported; the two sets of figures come from different sources and may not be directly comparable. The government has said it plans to commission 186 MW of data centres in 2027 and a further 109 MW in the second quarter of 2028.

None of the statements reported so far says whether workloads serving Kazakh or Uzbek users will move as a result of the attacks.

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Both facilities operate within UzCloud, the national cloud platform. The ministry lists computing infrastructure (IaaS), platform solutions (PaaS), software (SaaS), S3 object storage and backup services (BaaS), with customers paying only for the resources they use. Trend reported that the sites also offer AI Cloud and GPU-as-a-Service, with dedicated GPU servers for model training, machine learning, image recognition, video analytics and digital twins.

The ministry said both projects have received Tier III Design certifications from the Uptime Institute, which it said confirm that the designs meet global standards for reliability and fault tolerance. Trend added that the sites have redundant power and cooling and extra communication channels so that maintenance can proceed without service interruptions. Neither account gives figures for power capacity, racks or GPU counts.

Distribution and connectivity

The new sites are more than 300 km from Tashkent, the furthest of Uztelecom's facilities from the capital, the ministry said. Trend reported that the distributed layout is intended to support disaster recovery, with workloads able to move between facilities if one site fails.

The data centres are connected to Uztelecom's backbone network and to TAS-IX, the national internet traffic exchange point, the ministry said. It added that Uztelecom's infrastructure is developed in compliance with ISO/IEC 27001 and that the company plans to certify its data centres against the PCI DSS standard, which remains a future step. The Internet Society's Pulse tracker, which draws on self-reported PeeringDB records, listed two active exchange points in Uzbekistan in October, SNS-IX with 18 members and UZ-IX with none, and estimated that 22 per cent of 108 active networks can exchange traffic through IXPs. TAS-IX is not among the exchange points it lists.

Umar Izbasarov, director of the department for advanced development and investment projects at Uztelecom, was quoted by the ministry as saying: "Our goal is to make advanced technologies accessible to companies of all sizes across all regions of the country."

Zangiata and the Japanese partners

The next phase is a data centre in the Zangiata district of the Tashkent region, which the ministry said is also Tier III certified, with commissioning set for autumn 2026. Trend described it as the fifth site in Uztelecom's distributed network and said Uztelecom reports more than 13 million users of its digital services.

At Zangiata, Uztelecom, Toyota Tsusho, NTT DOCOMO BUSINESS and NEC will deploy the APN photonic network as part of the IOWN concept, the ministry said. Hideo Fuseda, Japan's Vice-Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications, launched the Zangiata pilot project on 22 September, according to the same account.

Market context

The opening comes as Uzbekistan promotes itself as a regional data hub. The government says investment commitments for new data centres exceed $6 billion, and that a state-run Nvidia-based computing cluster reached 90 per cent utilisation in its first month, Euronews reported. The same report said a 12 MW AI-focused data centre being built by Saudi Arabia's DataVolt in Tashkent is due to be ready by the end of 2026.

In June, Beeline Uzbekistan agreed commercial terms to become an anchor tenant at DataVolt's TAS-1 data centre in Tashkent IT Park, VEON said; the release did not disclose capacity or financing.

Cost remains a constraint for smaller users. Shamil Ibragimov, research director at the MIT Kuo Sharper Center, told Euronews that computing power is still expensive for many Uzbek startups, some of which continue to use foreign cloud providers, and that domestic capacity is not yet sufficient at a price local firms can afford. The ministry's account says organisations can access computing power through the new sites without building their own infrastructure, but it does not include pricing.

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The release puts the investment in this facility at approximately US$100 million, and says the long-term partnership targets approximately US$300 million in total. The building spans 7,500 sq m and will accommodate more than 650 cabinets. The companies say it uses seismic isolation technology and a "scalable architecture designed to support advanced artificial intelligence workloads", with infrastructure intended to support next-generation GPU technologies for both traditional and generative AI. The release does not state a tier rating.

Türkiye's Minister of Transport and Infrastructure, Abdulkadir Uraloğlu, attended the inauguration, according to the release. Hussain Sajwani, founder of DAMAC Group and chairman of DAMAC Digital, said that "advanced digital infrastructure will be fundamental to national competitiveness, innovation and sustainable growth." Engin Aksoy, chief executive of Vodafone Türkiye, said the facility was "Delivered in just one and half years."

A longer road to opening

Data Center Dynamics (DCD), which covered the opening on 14 September, reported that the partnership was announced in 2024 and that the facility was originally due to go live in the first quarter of 2025 before it was delayed. DCD also reported that the site was first planned to launch at 6 MW and grow to 12 MW, against the current target of 20 MW, and that it was first announced as a $100 million investment, with DAMAC Digital, formerly Edgnex, since confirming that total investment will reach $300 million.

The release itself says total investment is targeted to reach approximately US$300 million. Neither the release nor DCD's report gives a date for reaching 20 MW.

Vodafone's footprint and the location

DCD reported that this is Vodafone Türkiye's second data centre in Izmir and its sixth in the country, with two in Istanbul and one each in Izmir, Ankara and Adana. In the release, Aksoy said Vodafone Türkiye serves more than 25 million mobile customers, millions of small and medium-sized enterprises and thousands of large enterprises.

The companies cite the site's proximity to submarine cable landing stations connecting Europe, Africa and Asia as a key part of the investment case, and say it positions Izmir as an emerging data centre and connectivity hub for Türkiye and the wider Mediterranean region. The release does not name the cable systems concerned.

Where it sits in Türkiye's plans

The opening comes against a backdrop of larger announced plans. When Turkcell and Google Cloud announced a hyperscale cloud region for Türkiye in November 2025, the two were to invest a total of USD 3 billion, according to the Investment Office of the Presidency, with Google committing USD 2 billion over 10 years and Turkcell planning USD 1 billion. The Investment Office quoted Industry and Technology Minister Mehmet Fatih Kacır as saying "we will mobilize USD 10 billion in data center and AI investments by 2030."

DCD describes DAMAC Digital as the data centre arm of the UAE property firm DAMAC Group. It reported that the company holds a landbank of 6 GW across 35 sites in 13 countries, has live sites in Saudi Arabia and Thailand, broke ground on ten new sites in the first half of 2026, and targets more than 700 MW of operational capacity across more than 14 sites by the first quarter of 2027.

In the release, DAMAC Digital says it serves demand from hyperscalers, cloud providers, enterprises and AI-driven workloads. Neither the release nor DCD's report names a customer for the Izmir site.

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The plan to double is tied to Google. Turkcell will provide the infrastructure for a Google Cloud region in Türkiye expected to become operational in or around 2028 to 2029 with three or more zones, and it aims to more than double its data-centre capacity by the end of 2032, investing US$1 billion in connection with the partnership, the filing says.

Turkcell's data-centre and power assets

Method: every row comes from Turkcell's Form 20-F for the year to 31 December 2025, filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on 17 April 2026, from the sections on data-centre and cloud services, Turkcell Enerji, environmental matters and operating results. Capacities are as stated by the company: IT capacity for data centres, and installed or mechanical capacity for generation.

How the power side is built

Turkcell has two levers on power cost. The first is supply. Its subsidiary Turkcell Enerji holds a 20-year electricity supply licence from the Energy Market Regulatory Authority, issued in May 2017, that allows it to buy and sell electricity in wholesale and retail markets at unregulated prices, the filing says. Revenue in the group's Other segment rose mainly because of Turkcell Enerji's electricity sales to other group companies.

The second is generation. Turkcell Enerji owns the 18 MW Karadağ wind plant near İzmir through Boyut Enerji, which has a state purchase guarantee until the end of 2026, and added the two solar plants in 2025. Together the solar additions come to 225.8 MW of nameplate capacity, a Corridor Signal sum, against 54 MW of potential data-centre IT load. The filing says the aim is to offset a portion of the group's own consumption, not all of it.

Turkcell also says it has met all of its electricity consumption from renewable sources since 2021, verified by renewable energy certificates known as YEK-G. That is a certificate-based claim, separate from the physical output of its own plants.

What drove the cost down

The 12.6 per cent fall in energy cost in 2025 was "primarily driven by the impact of Turkish Lira depreciation and savings from solar energy initiatives, which more than offset the rise in energy prices," according to the filing. In 2024 the cost fell 15.9 per cent from TRY 6,948.7 million, which the company attributed mainly to the inflation effect. Both comparisons are in lira as reported under inflation accounting, so they show direction rather than a clean real-terms saving.

Market prices for large users have since moved in Türkiye's favour. Eurostat's data show the price for Turkish consumers using 70,000 to 149,999 MWh a year fell to €0.0486 per kWh, excluding VAT, in the first half of 2026 from €0.0702 in the second half of 2025, according to its October release. Turkcell's own consumption across 32 data centres and a national mobile network is likely to sit above that band, so the figure is an indication of direction rather than of Turkcell's price.

The risks are in the filing too. Turkcell says the profitability of the data-centre business is subject to rising energy costs and the stability of power supply, and that heat waves could raise energy prices or cause shortages, "in particular due to energy consumption of our network infrastructure or data centers." With 50 MW in use, a hyperscale region due around 2028 and a target to double capacity by 2032, the balance between owned generation, market purchases and certificates is the number to watch in the next annual report.

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