Vodafone opened the İzmir Data Center at a ceremony attended by Minister of Transport and Infrastructure Abdulkadir Uraloğlu. Completed in 1.5 years through a partnership between Vodafone Türkiye and DAMAC Digital, the facility was established in Gaziemir on an area of 7 thousand 500 square meters with an investment of approximately 100 million dollars, becoming the sixth data center in Türkiye. The largest in the Aegean Region, it began operations with more than 650 cabinets and a capacity of 4 MW; the investment is planned to be increased to 300 million dollars and the capacity to 20 MW. Colocation, cloud computing, connectivity, managed services and cybersecurity solutions will be offered. The infrastructure, equipped with seismic isolators and built to Tier III standards, supports GPU and artificial intelligence. Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Vodafone has made a real investment of 600 billion TL and processes more than 100 petabytes of data per month. İzmir’s location provides an access advantage; strengthening data sovereignty is targeted.
Why it matters
The facility is expanding companies’ and institutions’ access in the Aegean Region to data hosting, cloud computing, connectivity and cybersecurity services through İzmir-based infrastructure. Seismic isolators and the Tier III standard address the needs of organizations working with particularly critical data in terms of service continuity and physical resilience. Support for GPU and artificial intelligence shows that the center can be used not only for traditional data storage but also for applications requiring high processing power. How this capacity will be linked to the goal of data sovereignty, and on what timetable and in response to what level of demand the planned expansion will be implemented, remain among the open questions.
Term: data center
A data center is a facility where servers are housed together with cooling systems and uninterrupted electricity; discussions about the electricity and water consumption of artificial intelligence investments are conducted through these facilities.