President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s unveiling of Türkiye’s AI Action Plan 2026-2030 was received, largely, as a technology story: investment targets, data center capacity, specialist training pipelines, and regulatory frameworks. These are real components of the AI Action Plan. But reducing the announcement to its technical parameters misses what it actually represents as a strategic act. What President Erdoğan unveiled was not primarily an industrial policy. It was a positional declaration in a competition already restructuring the international order, whose consequences will extend far beyond the states currently dominating it.
The announcement deserves to be read on its own strategic terms. In an international system where artificial intelligence increasingly determines who sets the rules of digital governance, who controls the informational environment of conflict, and who can operate with genuine autonomy in crisis conditions, a national artificial intelligence (AI) strategy is not a technology roadmap. It is a statement about what kind of state a government intends to be in the emerging order. The question is not whether Türkiye’s plan matches Washington or Beijing in scale, but whether it reflects a coherent understanding of the structural competition underway and whether its instruments are calibrated to that reality.
AI as instrument of competition
The transformation of AI from a domain of commercial and scientific activity into an instrument of great power competition has followed a trajectory familiar to students of international relations. Capabilities that confer decisive strategic advantage do not remain neutral for long. States with revisionist ambitions seek to acquire them; states with established positions seek to deny them to rivals; and states caught in the middle are forced to choose between managed dependence and the costly pursuit of autonomous capacity.
What distinguishes the current AI competition from earlier technological races is not its intensity but its structural depth. Control over AI is not merely about a single weapons system or a specific military application. It is about the architecture of cognition at the state level: the capacity to process intelligence faster, to compress decision cycles in crisis conditions, to sustain autonomous military operations across contested domains, and to shape the informational environment in which adversaries and partners alike form their perceptions.
Washington and Beijing have both recognized this logic, and their responses reflect it. The American AI Action Plan is not fundamentally a science policy document; it is an attempt to lock in technological primacy before the window for doing so narrows. China’s parallel initiatives serve an equivalent purpose from a challenger’s position. Each seeks to draw other states into its technological orbit, creating dependencies that translate over time into political leverage. The chip control measures, the export restrictions, the competing infrastructure financing offers flowing from Washington and Beijing to capitals across the Global South are all expressions of this underlying structural competition. Technology, in this context, is the idiom of geopolitics.
The militarization of this competition is not its distortion but its inner logic. What the Ukraine battlefield demonstrated, with a clarity that no theoretical argument could match, is that AI-enabled autonomous systems have fundamentally altered the relationship between industrial capacity, operational tempo and strategic effect. Mass drone production, AI-assisted targeting, autonomous loitering munitions that classify and engage without human intermediation: these are no longer experimental capabilities. They are the operational baseline of contemporary high-intensity conflict. States that observed the war against Iran in 2026 and drew the correct conclusions began investing accordingly. The great powers understood this earlier than most, which is why the military dimension of AI competition has accelerated at a pace that governance frameworks, alliance structures and public debate have struggled to keep pace with.
What Türkiye’s strategy reveals
Türkiye’s AI Action Plan must be read against this structural background, not against the benchmarks of Silicon Valley or the ambitions of Zhongguancun. The plan’s four-pillar architecture, built around discovery, use, production and governance, commits at minimum ten billion dollars in predominantly private investment, targets one gigawatt of installed data center capacity by 2030, proposes a National Data Library, and aims to produce ten thousand advanced AI specialists alongside a hundred thousand application professionals. These are meaningful commitments. They are also measured against what the leading powers are mobilizing, a fraction of available resources. Honest analysis cannot obscure that gap.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Industry and Technology Minister M…
Read the full article at Daily Sabah →
TR