Why Türkiye Is Becoming an AI and Technology Hub

Türkiye is being described more often as an emerging technology hub. For anyone deciding where to build a software company, that description is only useful if it comes with specifics: what infrastructure exists, what support is available, what the state has committed to, which sectors have actually produced results, and what is still missing.

This is an account of the specifics, written from the position of a company building AI software here. It is long because the useful version is long. The summary version — good talent, good location, good incentives — is true and tells you nothing you can act on.

Start with what changed

Türkiye's technology sector did not appear recently. What changed is the concentration of three things within roughly eighteen months: a budgeted national AI plan, hyperscale cloud infrastructure inside the country, and a visa route built specifically for foreign technology founders and specialists.

Any one of those on its own is an announcement. Together they change the arithmetic of where a software company chooses to incorporate, because they remove three separate obstacles that previously had to be worked around rather than solved.

The policy commitment is on record

In June 2026, Türkiye published a national Artificial Intelligence Vision and Action Plan covering 2026 to 2030, later signed by presidential circular. It is structured around sixteen priority actions under the theme of noticing, benefiting from, producing and governing AI.

Several of its commitments are concrete enough to plan against.

Budget and compute

Public institutions are required to allocate at least two percent of their investment budgets to AI projects. That single requirement converts AI from a discretionary modernisation theme into a recurring line item across public administration, which changes the procurement environment for every company selling software here.

The plan targets one gigawatt of installed data centre computing capacity by 2030, alongside at least ten billion dollars in private investment in cloud technologies and digital infrastructure.

Twenty million GPU-hours have been allocated to researchers, startups and small businesses. This addresses the single largest cost barrier facing a small team doing genuine AI research. A founder without institutional backing can train, fine-tune and evaluate models without first raising a round to pay for compute.

Funds

Two funds sit underneath the plan. A National Artificial Intelligence Research Fund of ten billion lira, with a stated aim that forty percent of funded projects reach pilot or prototype stage. And an Artificial Intelligence Growth Fund of fifteen billion lira, intended to help at least twenty startups reach Series A or B.

The prototype target in the first fund is worth noting. It signals that the funding is aimed at work that ships rather than at research output measured in publications.

Institutions

The institutional structure moved with the plan. The Ministry of Industry and Technology's Directorate General of National Technology was renamed to cover artificial intelligence explicitly, and a separate Public Artificial Intelligence Directorate General was established.

Governance sits above that: a National AI Strategy Steering Board chaired at vice-presidential level, with operational coordination shared between the Presidency's Digital Transformation Office and the Ministry of Industry and Technology. The Digital Transformation Office handles public sector adoption and data sharing frameworks; the Ministry handles R&D incentives and the startup ecosystem.

The government has also said it will release BILGE, a Turkish large language model, to developers. For anyone building language technology for Turkish, a sovereign model matters less as a product than as a signal that Turkish-language capability is being treated as infrastructure rather than as a localisation afterthought.

Certification and governance

The 2026 programme also proposes standardised certification processes for public-sector AI tools, formal risk assessment procedures and ethical guidelines. Vendors selling into the public sector should expect that certification to become a requirement rather than a differentiator, and should design evaluation and audit trails into their systems now rather than retrofitting them.

The technopark system

The backbone of the ecosystem is the technology development zone, known locally as a technopark. There are 115 of them, hosting more than 13,000 companies, alongside 1,700 R&D and design centres.

What the status actually provides

A technopark is not an incubator with desks and a coffee machine. It is a legal status with tax consequences.

Companies operating inside one receive corporate tax exemption on qualifying software and R&D revenue. Qualifying software sales are exempt from value added tax. Income tax on R&D personnel working in the zone is effectively eliminated, and a substantial share of employer social security contributions is covered by the state. Customs exemptions apply to imported equipment used in qualifying work.

For a small company, the combined effect is not a marginal improvement in margin. It materially extends runway, because the largest cost in a software company is engineering payroll and the incentives attach directly to it.

What the status demands

The incentives are real and they are compliance-bearing. This is where newcomers most often misjudge the system.

Qualifying work has to be genuine research and development. It has to be performed inside the zone. It has to be defined as projects, with technical documentation, time records against those projects, and periodic review. Revenue from activity that is not qualifying R&D is taxed normally, which means a company doing both needs its accounting to separate them cleanly from the start.

A company that treats the status as a tax address will fail an audit. A company that is genuinely doing engineering with technical uncertainty will find that the documentation it needs to produce is documentation it should be producing anyway.

Choosing a zone

Major zones include Bilişim Vadisi in Kocaeli, ITU ARI Teknokent and Yıldız Teknopark in Istanbul, Teknopark Ankara and Antalya Teknokent.

Selection matters more than the incentive arithmetic suggests, because the incentives are broadly uniform and everything else is not. Zones differ in sector concentration, in the university research they sit next to, in the density of their investor networks, in cost, and in how active their corporate partnership programmes are. Yıldız Teknopark alone hosts hundreds of companies with a substantial AI-focused cohort.

The practical question when choosing is not which zone offers the best terms. It is which zone puts you next to the people you need — researchers in your field, customers in your sector, or investors who fund what you build.

Separately, the former Atatürk Airport terminal in Istanbul is being converted into a startup hub, which will consolidate a large part of the ecosystem into a single site.

Capital

Public instruments

Public fund-of-funds mechanisms have mobilised 2.8 billion dollars into the startup ecosystem. A recent 300 million dollar allocation to venture capital funds is expected to draw more than 750 million dollars in total, and 150 million dollars has been directed specifically at AI-focused funds.

The largest instrument is HIT-30, a 30 billion dollar support initiative that includes a 1.6 billion dollar call for artificial intelligence projects aimed at accelerating digital transformation.

Grant channels

Alongside these sit the long-standing grant channels that most early companies actually use.

TÜBİTAK runs R&D and entrepreneurship support programmes, including BİGG for early-stage technology ventures. KOSGEB supports small and medium enterprises through a separate set of instruments. Export-oriented support exists for branding and foreign market promotion.

Both TÜBİTAK and KOSGEB assess technical substance rather than commercial narrative. This is worth understanding as a structural feature rather than a hurdle: the documentation a company produces for a technopark application — project definitions, technical uncertainty, method, expected outputs — is largely the same documentation these programmes require. A company that writes it properly once can reuse it across several applications.

Private capital

Venture funding has deepened. Technology startup investment reached 5.3 billion dollars over a five-year period. In 2024, 136 new funds raised 515 million dollars, bringing total fundraising over five years to 2.3 billion dollars. Analysis by KPMG and 212 found artificial intelligence was the leading Turkish vertical by deal count in 2025, and the Investment Office reported more than 1,000 AI-focused startups and over 300 investment transactions in that year.

The wider foreign investment picture moved in the same direction: Türkiye attracted 13.1 billion dollars in FDI during 2025, up 12.2 percent on the previous year.

Türkiye has eight companies described domestically as Turcorns, and the government has stated a target of 100,000 technology startups.

Sectors that have already produced results

Ecosystem claims are best tested against exits, because exits are the part that cannot be announced without happening.

Gaming is the clearest case. Turkish studios have produced repeated large outcomes, and the sector has generated a second generation of founders and angel investors who have operated at scale before. E-commerce and delivery produced Trendyol and Getir, each having raised more than a billion dollars over their lifetimes. The acquisition of Hepsiburada by Kaspi.kz for 1.1 billion dollars in late 2024 was the largest transaction in Turkish startup history.

The industrial side matters as much for credibility. Defence technology has driven sustained domestic engineering investment, and the AI Action Plan explicitly proposes transferring robotics and autonomous systems knowledge from defence to civilian use, with pilot projects, university-industry robotics centres and test sites targeted by the end of 2027. Togg, the domestic electric vehicle programme, has roughly 120,000 vehicles on the road.

The pattern worth drawing from this is that the ecosystem is self-reinforcing in a specific way: early outcomes produced operators, and those operators now fund and advise the next cohort. That is the difference between an ecosystem and a set of incentives.

Infrastructure caught up recently

Until recently, a technology company in Türkiye with data residency requirements had two options: run its own hardware, or accept that data sat in another jurisdiction.

That changed in May 2026, when AWS made a Local Zone generally available in Istanbul, bringing compute, block storage, object storage and local snapshots inside Turkish borders. Google Cloud announced a three billion dollar partnership with Turkcell in November 2025, with a full region targeted to become operational between 2028 and 2029.

This is the part of the picture that most directly changes engineering decisions. A regulated buyer asking where personal data is processed can now be given an answer that involves neither a foreign jurisdiction nor a self-managed data centre. For financial services, healthcare and public sector work, that answer is often the precondition for the conversation rather than a detail within it.

It is worth being precise about the limits. A Local Zone is not a full region, and residency is a property of each service in an architecture rather than of the deployment as a whole. Companies claiming in-country processing need to map it service by service.

Talent and the Tech Visa

The training pipeline

The AI Action Plan sets a training target of 10,000 AI specialists, 100,000 AI application professionals and five million AI-literate citizens by 2028, supported by a national AI literacy and safe use programme.

The distinction between the first two numbers is the useful one. Ten thousand specialists builds models. A hundred thousand application professionals deploys them into businesses that would otherwise never adopt them. The second group is what determines whether AI software has a domestic market.

Global technology companies including Microsoft, Google Cloud, AWS and SAP operate locally and hire from the same pool, which raises the floor on salaries but also raises the level of the available talent.

The Tech Visa

For foreign founders and specialists, the Türkiye Tech Visa has been operating since September 2024.

It provides a three-year work permit through an expedited and exceptional procedure, rather than the standard work permit route. Family members receive simplified residence processes matched to the main applicant's permit. Holders gain access to the technopark incentive structure described above, including the income tax and social security relief that applies to R&D personnel.

It is an invitation-style programme with two tracks: one for individuals with critical technical expertise, and one for founders establishing technology startups with innovative business models. Applications are made through the programme's own channel.

The combination of that route with technopark status is the practical path for a foreign-founded technology company here: establish the entity, define and qualify the R&D activity, enter a zone, and access the incentive and grant system from inside it.

A realistic sequence for a foreign founder

The steps do not run in parallel as neatly as a summary implies. In rough order:

Incorporate. A Turkish limited company is the normal vehicle. This determines tax treatment, and the structure chosen affects later eligibility for technopark status and investment incentive certificates.

Define the R&D. Before applying anywhere, write down what the technical uncertainty is, what method addresses it, and what the expected output is. This document is the input to technopark admission, to TÜBİTAK applications and to the Tech Visa startup track. Written badly, it blocks all three.

Apply to a zone. Admission is assessed on the substance of that definition. Zones evaluate whether the work is genuine development rather than implementation.

Sort permits. The Tech Visa route runs through a work visa application at a Turkish mission abroad, followed by a work permit application to the Ministry of Labour and Social Security.

Then look at grants. TÜBİTAK and KOSGEB programmes have their own calendars and their own evaluation criteria. Applying before the R&D definition is solid wastes a cycle.

Expect each of these to take longer than the published timeline. Build the sequence into your runway assumptions rather than treating it as administrative overhead running in the background.

What the picture does not include

An honest assessment has to include the constraints, and institutional readers will know them anyway.

Currency volatility affects planning for any company with lira costs and foreign-currency revenue, or the reverse. It is manageable with deliberate treasury practice, but it is a live consideration rather than a footnote.

Bureaucratic process is real. Company formation, technopark admission, work permits and grant applications each carry their own documentation requirements and timelines, and they interlock rather than run independently.

Late-stage capital remains thinner than early-stage capital. Companies that scale past the domestic market frequently raise their later rounds abroad, which makes international structure and investor relations a consideration earlier than founders expect.

The incentive system rewards research and development specifically. It is well suited to a company doing engineering work with genuine technical uncertainty and poorly suited to one doing implementation or services work under a technology label. This is a feature of the design, and it filters accordingly.

Why it adds up anyway

The case for building here rests on a combination that is hard to assemble elsewhere.

Geography. Türkiye sits between European, Middle Eastern, Caucasus and Central Asian markets. A company based here can serve corridor trade in a way that a company based in any one of those regions cannot. For software aimed at cross-border commerce, that position is a product advantage rather than a logistical one.

Adoption. Turkish businesses adopt digital tools quickly, and the domestic market is large enough to be a real test environment rather than a pilot. A product that works for Turkish SMEs has been tested against demanding users before it is exported.

Cost structure. Engineering talent is skilled and affordable relative to Western Europe, and the technopark incentives extend a small company's runway materially rather than marginally.

Policy direction. The commitments above are budgeted, dated and institutionally assigned. That does not guarantee outcomes, but it changes the risk profile of a ten-year decision, which is the horizon on which company location is actually chosen.

Where we sit in it

HublinkTech is registered in Istanbul and builds AI software from here. Clavix360, our AI CRM and ERP platform, is live. Hublinkly, our B2B trade network, is in beta. Ara, our trade intelligence agent, is in development and is built for the Türkiye–Iran–Caucasus–Central Asia corridor.

That last one is the clearest illustration of the geographic argument. A trade intelligence system for that corridor requires proximity to the trade itself — to the regulatory sources, the languages, the routes and the traders who use it. It is a product that makes sense from here and makes considerably less sense from anywhere else.

The corridor is the reason. The incentives make the engineering affordable; the geography makes the product possible.

Official sources

• Türkiye Tech Visa — programme details and applications
• Invest in Türkiye — Presidency Investment Office, FDI and sector data
• Ministry of Industry and Technology — technoparks, R&D incentives, AI Action Plan
• TÜBİTAK — R&D and entrepreneurship support programmes
• KOSGEB — SME support programmes
• Bilişim Vadisi — technology development zone, Kocaeli
• ITU ARI Teknokent — technology development zone, Istanbul