18 days ago
Hi Railway team,
I would like to suggest Istanbul / Türkiye as a future Railway region or compute location.
Railway is already a great platform for independent developers, agencies, SaaS teams, and small teams that want fast deployments, managed databases, observability, and a smooth developer experience. Many developers in Türkiye like Railway, but for production workloads, the lack of a nearby region can sometimes make teams choose alternative platforms.
Türkiye has recently become much more visible in the global cloud and data center ecosystem.
AWS announced its first AWS Direct Connect location in Türkiye at the Equinix IL4 data center near Istanbul. Google Cloud and Turkcell also announced a strategic partnership for a new Google Cloud region in Türkiye, with Google Cloud describing this as part of a 10-year, $2 billion investment. Reuters also reported that Turkcell plans to invest $1 billion by the end of 2032 to expand its data center infrastructure as part of this cooperation.
These developments show that Türkiye is increasingly becoming a regional cloud and digital infrastructure hub, not only a local market.
An Istanbul-based Railway region could be valuable because:
- Türkiye has around 85 million people and a large, active internet population.
- DataReportal reported 77.5 million internet users in Türkiye by the end of 2025, with 88.3% internet penetration.
- Istanbul can serve not only Türkiye, but also nearby markets across the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Gulf, and the Eastern Mediterranean.
- Nearby countries such as Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Kuwait, and Lebanon create a combined regional reach of more than 200 million people together with Türkiye.
- Many SaaS teams, agencies, and developers in this region need lower latency, better data locality, and stronger infrastructure arguments for local and regional customers.
- KVKK and data locality discussions are becoming more important for Turkish customers.
- Railway could become the developer-first infrastructure platform in a region where larger cloud providers are already starting to invest more seriously.
Railway does not need to compete with hyperscalers in the same way. Railway’s strength is developer experience. An Istanbul / Türkiye location could make that experience much more attractive for production workloads in this region.
I and many developer friends would genuinely like to use Railway’s deployment, database, observability, and infrastructure experience from servers located in or near Istanbul.
I hope Railway considers Istanbul / Türkiye in its future region expansion plans.
Relevant public references:
- AWS announced its first AWS Direct Connect location in Türkiye at Equinix IL4 near Istanbul.
- Google Cloud announced plans for a new Google Cloud region in Türkiye as part of a 10-year, $2 billion investment.
- Reuters reported that Turkcell and Google signed a strategic cooperation agreement on cloud technologies, with Turkcell planning a $1 billion data center infrastructure investment by the end of 2032.
- DataReportal reported 77.5 million internet users in Türkiye by the end of 2025, with internet penetration at 88.3%.
0 Threads mention this feature
1 Replies
18 days ago
One more way to quantify the Istanbul / Türkiye region opportunity:
If we combine Türkiye, selected Balkan markets, and selected nearby Middle East / Gulf / Eastern Mediterranean markets, the potential regional footprint becomes very significant.
Using 2024 population and land-area data:
- Türkiye: around 85.5M people, around 785K km²
- Selected Balkan markets: around 58.5M people, around 777K km²
- Selected Middle East / Gulf / Eastern Mediterranean markets, excluding Iran and Iraq: around 104.5M people, around 2.87M km²
Together, this represents roughly:
- 248M+ permanent residents
- 4.4M+ km² of regional coverage
- A strategic position between Europe, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and the Eastern Mediterranean
The visitor-flow side makes the opportunity even more interesting.
Türkiye alone received around 60.6M international tourist arrivals in 2024, or around 62.2M total visitors depending on the reporting method.
Selected Balkan markets also have very large annual tourism flows:
- Greece: around 40.7M visitors
- Croatia: around 21.3M tourist arrivals
- Bulgaria: around 13.1M foreign guests
- Romania: around 13.35M foreign visitor arrivals
- Albania: around 11.7M foreign visitors
- Kosovo: around 6.94M foreign visitors
- Slovenia: around 6.6M tourist arrivals
- Serbia: around 2.38M foreign tourists
- Bosnia and Herzegovina: around 2M tourist arrivals
- North Macedonia: around 1.26M tourist arrivals
- Montenegro: around 2.61M tourist arrivals
That is roughly 120M+ annual visitor / tourism flow across selected Balkan markets alone.
Nearby Middle East, Gulf, and Eastern Mediterranean markets also add substantial visitor flow:
- Saudi Arabia: around 29.7M inbound tourists
- Dubai: around 18.72M international overnight visitors
- Qatar: around 5.08M visitors
- Oman: around 3.9M inbound arrivals
- Bahrain: around 10.86M tourist arrivals
- Jordan: around 6.1M inbound arrivals
- Lebanon: around 1.13M foreign tourist arrivals
- Cyprus: around 4.04M tourist arrivals
This selected non-Balkan regional set adds at least around 79M+ annual visitor / tourism flow, even without including Kuwait and Syria due to data consistency.
So a conservative regional view around Istanbul / Türkiye looks like this:
- 248M+ permanent residents
- 260M+ annual visitor / tourism flow
- 4.4M+ km² of surrounding market coverage
Tourism arrivals are not the same as permanent population, and methodologies differ by country. But for infrastructure strategy, they are still a strong market signal.
Many companies in this region are not only building software for local residents. They are also building for tourism, hospitality, booking, education, marketplaces, fintech-adjacent services, transportation, events, agencies, and regional B2B software.
This is why an Istanbul / Türkiye Railway region would not only be a local Turkish region. It could become a developer-first compute location for a much larger regional economy.