Gökhan Ergöçün
27 October 2026•Update: 27 October 2026
Google Cloud unveiled a national cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) upskilling academy in partnership with the Informatics Industry Association of Türkiye on Tuesday to certify more than 1,000 professionals within a year.
Announced at Google Cloud Day Türkiye 2026 in Istanbul, which gathered more than 800 business leaders, developers and officials, the initiative supports the company's planned $2 billion local cloud region investment.
The program aligns with the Industry and Technology Ministry's 2026-2030 AI action plan, which aims to mobilize $10 billion and deploy one gigawatt of computing capacity.
"Advanced technology only creates sustainable economic value when local talent has the capability to drive it," said Onder Guler, country manager for Google Cloud Türkiye.
"Alongside our planned $2 billion local cloud region investment, we are equipping Turkish developers, engineers, and enterprise leaders with the certified skills required to deploy and govern production-grade AI systems," he added.
Funded by Google Cloud's Economic and Community Development division, the Türkiye Cloud and AI Upskilling Academy will offer subsidized certifications for developers, strategic training for executives and modernization roadmaps for local companies.
The event also marked the first anniversary of Google Cloud's 10-year, $2 billion local cloud region project in partnership with Turkish telecom operator Turkcell.
Speaking at the event, Guler said physical data center construction in the capital, Ankara, is progressing ahead of schedule and that local partner firms now employ more than 750 Google-certified engineers holding over 1,000 advanced certifications.
He said the upcoming Ankara facility will bring the same technological capabilities, security, speed and flexibility that power global services such as Google Maps, YouTube and Gemini for billions of users.
He added that this momentum will accelerate further in 2027 as partners increasingly help enterprises optimize business processes through artificial intelligence.
Google Cloud is also working closely with the Industry and Technology Ministry, the Cybersecurity Directorate and the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency to support regulatory compliance across key sectors.
To support startups, the company highlighted its collaboration with Türkiye's Small and Medium Enterprises Development Organization, providing entrepreneurs with financial and technical access to cloud computing and Gemini.
During the summit, Turkcell showcased its new hybrid-cloud data platform built on Google Cloud technologies for nonregulated digital services.
90% of Fortune 100 companies use Gemini
Also speaking at the event, Andrew Love, Google Cloud's AI go-to-market executive operations lead for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, highlighted the shift toward autonomous AI agents in business.
Love praised Turkish glassmaker Sisecam, noting that the 90-year-old global manufacturing powerhouse, with over 25,000 employees, including 11,000 in Türkiye, is undergoing an agentic transformation.
"AI is just a tool; it's the people who are the actual multiplier when it comes to your business," Love said, adding: "The model is just raw power; it's what you do with that model and who you give the model to that actually transforms a business."
Citing research showing that employees spend 40% of their time on "work about work" across multiple software windows, Love said 90% of Fortune 100 companies are already using Gemini Enterprise to streamline operations.
He said Gemini Agent functions as a universal agent with shared enterprise memory and unified security controls across platforms such as Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, ServiceNow, Jira and Salesforce.
"We're the only cloud provider in the world where you can get these models today, along with open weight and open source models that we will continue to add," Love said, referring to unified platform access to Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI models.
