INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres

The strategic partnership has been formalised through the signing of a Shareholders’ Agreement to design, develop, and operate Ankara Data Hub, a 48 MW IT capacity data centre that will be one of the largest and most advanced in the region.

The facility will be Uptime Tier III certified and will incorporate the latest technologies and world-class operational standards to meet the evolving needs of hyperscalers, cloud service providers, and local enterprises.

Trendyol will occupy a significant portion of the data centre’ s capacity, underlining its desire to support its local and international activities with cutting edge technology services. The data centre’ s remaining capacity will be commercially available to other major cloud players and enterprise customers in the future.

With a total development cost of approximately US $ 500 million, the first phase comprising 9.6 MW of IT capacity is scheduled to go live by Q3 2026. The construction is actively underway in Temelli, Ankara progressing in line with the anticipated delivery milestones.

Çağlayan Çetin, President of Trendyol Group, said,“ Trendyol ' s leadership is built on its worldclass technological solutions and smart data applications. The Ankara Data Centre project will significantly enhance the quality of service we offer to our rapidly growing local and international customer base, and represents further evidence of our commitment to investing in Türkiye and our confidence in the country’ s strong digital ecosystem.”

" This partnership represents a major step forward in shaping the future of digital infrastructure in the region," said Tarek

Al Ashram, CEO of Castle Investments. " Combining our extensive track record in delivering mission-critical data centre facilities with Trendyol’ s technological leadership and digital scale in Türkiye will make the Ankara Data Hub an iconic project and a new regional benchmark."

The partnership was formalised in a signing ceremony in Dubai with Çağlayan Çetinn, President of Trendyol Group and Tarek Al Ashram, CEO of Castle Investments, in the presence of His Excellency Omar Sultan Al Olama, UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Digital Economy, and Remote Work Applications, and Mustafa Varank, Chair of the Committee on Industry, Trade, Energy, Natural Resources, Information and Technology at the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye and head of the Türkiye – United Arab Emirates Inter-Parliamentary Friendship Group.

Founded in 2010, Trendyol is the e-commerce marketplace in Türkiye and one of the top e-commerce platforms in the world. The platform connects 250,000 sellers and brands with 40 million customers on dedicated local language apps in Türkiye, Germany, Azerbaijan, the Gulf States and, most recently, in Romania, Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Greece.

Castle Investments is a privately held company owned by Tarek Al Ashram, a pioneer in the Middle East data centre industry. Since 2012, Al Ashram has led the development and operation of large-scale, mission-critical data centres across the region. p

70 INTELLIGENTCIO MIDDLE EAST www. intelligentcio. com