Türkiye to open its Turkish-language AI model BILGE to developers soon, minister says

Industry and Technology Minister Mehmet Fatih Kacır said the first version of BILGE, a large language model built for Turkish, will soon be available to developers, as Ankara targets at least $10 billion in data center investment by 2030.

Türkiye will soon release the first version of BILGE, its homegrown Turkish-language large language model, to developers, Industry and Technology Minister Mehmet Fatih Kacır said Saturday at the TRT World Forum in Istanbul.

"By making the first version of BILGE available to developers very soon, we will enable our startups, researchers and companies to build new products and services on Türkiye's own AI capabilities," Kacır said, adding that the model would strengthen the country's technological independence.

The "Navigating Responsibility in the Age of AI" session at TRT World Forum 2026 in Istanbul

Under Türkiye's 2030 AI Action Plan, the government aims to give 5 million citizens basic AI literacy, train 10,000 advanced AI experts and 100,000 professionals, open at least 2,000 public datasets to researchers, raise national data center capacity to at least 1 gigawatt and mobilize at least $10 billion in private-sector-led investment in data centers, cloud computing and AI infrastructure.

Kacır also said Ankara is drafting risk-based AI rules with stronger safeguards for high-risk systems, will set up regulatory sandboxes in priority sectors and plans an AI Ethics Board on privacy, discrimination and child safety. He warned that global AI computing power is concentrated in a handful of companies, estimating that five firms hold about 70% of it. "We can delegate authority to AI, but we cannot delegate responsibility," he said.