Large power users in Türkiye paid 40 per cent of the EU average price

Large electricity users in Türkiye paid an average of €0.0486 per kilowatt-hour in the first half of 2026, 40 per cent of the EU average of €0.1212, Eurostat data updated on 16 October show.

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.