The Future of Data Centers: Industry Roundtable with SERBAN
Press Bulletin / November 2025
Moderator: Hayati Küçük, Chairman of the Board, Argeplano
Ali İhsan Güner, CTO, SERBAN
Buğrahan Şirin, Partner, HPP International Turkey
Mehmet Sami Kılıç, General Manager, Turner International
Prof. Dr. Zeynep Işık, Faculty Member, Yıldız Technical University, Department of Civil Engineering
Hayati Küçük
At recent international events we have attended, we have seen that, with the rise of artificial intelligence and cloud technologies, data centers have become one of the leading investment areas in real estate. I would like us to discuss where real estate development and data center operation overlap to create value.
Let me start by introducing myself. I am an architect and civil engineer, and chairman of the board of Argeplano Project Process Management. We develop projects across a range of sectors, including real estate, construction, tourism, logistics, industrial facilities, data centers, and information technologies. We manage every stage from planning through to a ready-to-operate opening, including feasibility studies, design, tender management, site management, and operational setup. Within GYODER, we also work to develop value-added projects by combining the dynamics of the business world with an academic and scientific perspective.
Mehmet Sami Kılıç
I am the Vice President responsible for Europe at Turner International. I oversee the Istanbul and London offices, providing project management services in both countries. I have been with the company for approximately 19 years; I started in the U.S. and later worked in Belgrade, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan. Today, I serve as General Manager in Turkey while also overseeing Europe. At our core, we provide project management services. In previous years, we managed large-scale projects such as the Istanbul Finance Center, Atatürk Airport, and the Türkiye İş Bankası Towers. We are currently working on Şişecam’s Tarsus facility, which will be one of the largest factories in the world. I also serve as Vice President of the Environmentally Friendly Green Buildings Association.
Zeynep Işık
I am a faculty member in the Department of Civil Engineering at Yıldız Technical University. I have been working in construction, project, and construction management for approximately 20 years, and I currently lead the building management program at the university. We focus on a wide yet interconnected range of topics, including digitalization, sustainability, energy management, facility management, and strategic planning. I have taken part in more than 40 projects to date, and my work continues. I have also held a number of administrative positions at the university, including coordinator of the Technology Transfer Office at Yıldız Teknopark, member of the Teknopark Board, vice rector, and director of the Institute of Science. During my time at the Teknopark, I was involved in founding and running many national and international projects in entrepreneurship and innovation, including the establishment of the Technology Transfer Office, the Incubation Center, and the International Incubation Center in Silicon Valley.
Buğrahan Şirin
At HPP Architects, I represent the architectural and design side. HPP, a German firm with a 95-year history, has completed buildings across many typologies, including data centers and computing centers. I have managed HPP’s Turkey office for approximately 12 years; we have worked on large-scale projects in Istanbul and continue to do so.
Ali İhsan Güner
I am the CTO of SERBAN, which provides end-to-end solutions for data centers, and I am responsible for the technical side of our data center projects. Part of Açık Holding, SERBAN focuses the vast majority of its operations on data centers. We have completed 12 modules in Turkey and are currently working with both domestic and international investors on projects in İzmir and Ankara. We also have ongoing projects in Saudi Arabia and Dubai, and we are about to start a new one in Switzerland. Working with investors, we develop land for data center use: we find suitable sites, manage the design and construction processes, and obtain all necessary permits.
Unlike conventional buildings, data centers must be handed over to the client fully operational. You could compare them to cars: they must work flawlessly. Unlike a car, however, and perhaps more like a submarine, every system is redundant, so if one component fails, its backup takes over. This redundancy also allows maintenance to be carried out while the facility is running, since data centers must never stop. Unlike conventional construction, testing and commissioning must be built into project management from the very start. You cannot achieve this with separate components sourced piecemeal from outside; everything must be delivered in-house. Mikrolink, another Açık Holding company, handles the planning and design of our data centers. As a company dedicated to this sector, we also provide turnkey solutions across cooling systems, electronic systems, leak detection, and energy management.
Hayati Küçük
Mehmet Sami, let’s start with you. Drawing on your experience as a construction management company, could you give us a snapshot of the sector globally today? How did we get here?
Mehmet Sami Kılıç
In the U.S., office buildings used to make up close to 50% of our portfolio. With the decline of the office market during the pandemic, data centers have grown to account for around 40% of our revenues, driven in particular by demand from central regions such as Ohio and Kansas City, where land and energy costs are lower. This demand stems from the global digitalization trend, and naturally, project developers see data centers as a sound investment.
We are starting to see similar demand in Turkey. With a population approaching 90 million, high mobile usage, strong internet penetration, and growth in e-commerce, fintech, gaming, and cloud services, the sector is expanding. Data localization regulations such as the KVKK also steer investors. In addition, Turkey’s strategic location between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East provides low-latency access to a wide region. According to our research, Turkey is the most suitable country for investment in this region after Poland, considering its climate, construction costs, and available engineering workforce. About half of the proposals we have received recently relate to data centers, a strong signal that developers need to move in this direction.
Foreign investors have specific criteria. First, energy and water must be available locally. Once they have found a suitable site based on these two factors, they approach us as project managers. Rather than building local teams, they prefer to manage the work through us, mainly because economic uncertainty since 2019 has made costs difficult to control. Finding contractors is not difficult, but they are reluctant to enter into long-term contracts because of cost concerns. With equipment and construction materials dependent on imports, convincing contractors can be challenging.
Hayati Küçük
Looking at the global picture, could you summarize foreign investors’ interest in Turkey’s data center sector?
Ali İhsan Güner
Investors coming to Turkey are not looking to store data here for use around the world. Turkey’s domestic market currently has a capacity shortfall of more than 500 megawatts, which could grow to gigawatts as the sector expands. Globally, data centers tend to cluster along submarine data cable routes. In our region, these cables come from China and India, reach Israel, and continue via Cyprus and Greece; only a small portion crosses Turkey. To increase investment, Turkey must expand its submarine cable network and become a key part of international infrastructure.
Secondly, data security is crucial for foreign investors. They need a guarantee that any data stored in Turkey will remain untouched. Some projects are built to keep data within Turkey, which is perfectly acceptable, but when foreign data is stored here, the same assurance must be provided. Another advantage for Turkey is its growing energy capacity. For example, while Saudi Arabia faces energy constraints, Turkey will soon have a nuclear power plant providing continuous power, which is critical for AI data centers.
When evaluating a project, zoning and proximity to energy are the primary concerns. Obtaining a permit for a data center in a commercial zone is difficult, because floor heights in commercial buildings are normally 4.5 meters, while industrial facilities exceed 7 meters. Industrial-zoned sites are therefore preferred. Energy availability is the second key factor. Once these conditions are met, other aspects such as soil, seismicity, and climate are considered. Ankara is ideal because approximately 61–62% “free cooling” is possible, meaning that part of the cooling load can be met with outside air rather than electricity. Other cities may have better cooling potential but lack qualified personnel, which is why Ankara is favored. Data centers are critical infrastructure and are expected to remain fully operational even after an earthquake.
Hayati Küçük
From a real estate perspective, data centers resemble industrial buildings, but with complex electromechanical and technological systems. How is academia approaching this sector?
Zeynep Işık
The first examples of this building type appeared in the U.S. and Europe about ten years ago, but it took time for academia to catch up. Looking back, data centers are often described as the digital warehouses of the modern economy: just as ports, airports, and logistics centers handle physical goods, data centers handle the processing, storage, and secure circulation of data. From an academic perspective, the focus extends beyond technical infrastructure to strategic and sustainability dimensions. Studies examine energy access, regulation, and climatic conditions, while decarbonization and waste heat recovery are major research topics. Investment forecasting is also key: how much capacity does a country actually need? If data centers are to be treated as real estate investments, market analyses and digitalization trends should be built into feasibility studies and investment decisions.
Hayati Küçük
From an architectural perspective, could you outline the design process, from concept to multidisciplinary engineering integration?
Buğrahan Şirin
Once the investment decision is made and a site is selected, the project management team takes over and the design is put out to tender. We come in just before construction begins on site.
Data centers are still an emerging building typology. Initially, they were small rooms added to existing corporate headquarters to house servers. Over time, as data volumes grew and the internet expanded, standalone buildings appeared, especially in financial hubs such as Frankfurt. Architecturally, the focus shifts from human comfort to machine comfort and operational efficiency. Cable routing, energy systems, and infrastructure are highly integrated, so design inputs are primarily technical and aesthetic concerns become secondary. Because investor briefs are highly professional, the design process is more compact and structured, allowing a faster move into implementation.
Hayati Küçük
When evaluating a potential data center investment, we first assess its position within the sector, its target customers, and its location. Site studies, compliance with international standards, and redundancy requirements are critical. From a real estate perspective, a 100,000 m² plot may yield a 70,000 m² facility with a basement plus two floors; technically, however, it is a complex organism of interconnected systems. Because technology evolves so rapidly, future renovation must also be planned for from the outset.
Mehmet Sami Kılıç
Data centers call for unusual precautions during construction. On one project, for example, we had to make sure that a neighboring factory would not produce explosives that could affect the center. Building a data center is not like building a hotel or an office; every step must be precise. There is no such thing as provisional acceptance: everything must work like a Swiss watch. Local contractors often lack relevant experience, which shows in price differences of 30–40% between bids. Delays incur heavy penalties, and every detail matters; even a defect in a single pipe can lead to material being rejected.
Ali İhsan Güner
Data centers are categorized under standards such as Uptime or EN, which determine redundancy levels and maintenance capabilities. Hyperscale centers, none of which exist in Turkey yet, have their own standards. U.S.-based standards also set rules on location, security, and operations. Market leaders such as Amazon, Azure, Google, Alibaba, and Oracle follow their own protocols, although none of them operates in Turkey yet.
Hayati Küçük
There are more than 7,500 data centers worldwide and 72 in Turkey, of which around 25–30 are large-scale facilities. Globally, individual data center investments are increasingly clustering in industrial zones and logistics hubs because of energy and infrastructure costs. In Turkey, data centers are concentrated in Istanbul, Ankara, and İzmir. The advantages of such clustering include ready infrastructure; the disadvantages may include less flexibility in site selection.
Ali İhsan Güner
In Turkey, investment is concentrated in Temelli, Ankara, where about 300 MW of capacity is planned, thanks to its organized industrial zone (OSB) status, low energy costs, and good transport links. For investors, getting into operation quickly matters more than land cost. Without incentives, the payback period is 7–8 years; with incentives, it is 4–5 years. In short, “the best data center is the one completed fastest.”
Buğrahan Şirin
In Europe, decommissioned heavy-industry sites offer high-capacity energy infrastructure that is well suited to large modular data centers, although brownfield conditions must be taken into account.
Hayati Küçük
Turning to human resources, are there any university programs in data center management?
Zeynep Işık
There are no dedicated programs yet, but the sector requires multidisciplinary expertise spanning engineering, IT, and cybersecurity. Certification programs may emerge in the future. Data centers require coordinated, cross-disciplinary professional teams.
Mehmet Sami Kılıç
On data center projects, our teams grow to between 30 and 100 specialists. In the U.S., financing often draws on local incentives. Turkey offers similar incentives, such as VAT exemptions and customs duty waivers. Currency volatility, however, is a risk that affects energy prices and investor confidence.
Hayati Küçük
At recent international events such as Platform Global in France, foreign investors asked whether Turkey has sufficient energy infrastructure. Government support, regulation, and a skilled workforce are critical to attracting investment. Building networks and showcasing our capabilities globally are also essential.
Buğrahan Şirin
BIM-based digital twin modeling is becoming mandatory, and as-built models are used for maintenance and real-time monitoring.
Ali İhsan Güner
BIM is essential. For example, fitting 60 kVA into a data center of around 30,000 m², with all its cabling and ventilation, requires detailed 3D modeling that would be impossible without BIM. Construction quality and a skilled workforce are crucial, and costs in Turkey are higher than in Europe or the Gulf. Accumulated know-how is the key to global competitiveness.
Buğrahan Şirin
Environmental impact is important: noise, energy consumption, and proximity to residential areas must be carefully managed.
Zeynep Işık
Data centers should be treated as the digital warehouses of the modern economy. Strategic investment, energy integration, and sustainability are essential, and with the right planning, data centers can become high-value real estate assets.
Mehmet Sami Kılıç
Data centers are not easy investments, legally or operationally. Even a one-day delay can have serious consequences. The sector requires careful analysis, and investors must be attracted with strong incentives and infrastructure. Turkey has strong potential thanks to its strategic location, digitalization trends, and government support.
Hayati Küçük
Thank you all for taking part. For our country to strengthen its global presence, we must focus on high-value, low-footprint projects, and data centers can be a catalyst for this goal. We have the companies, academics, and professionals capable of developing valuable projects. Public sector support in infrastructure, energy, and investment incentives, combined with strong professional networks, will allow us to implement these projects efficiently. Our individual experience should be brought together and organized collectively to maximize its impact. I expect this topic to gain momentum in the near future, and I hope today’s meeting will be the first step toward broader, more detailed, and more inclusive discussions within the business community.
GYODER Gösterge