I’ve lived in Bodrum with my family for nine years. Friends fly in, stay a few days, and leave a little stunned. The sea, the food, the light. And the people: warm, hospitable, ready to help before you’ve finished asking. That part, visitors get right away.
What fewer people see is how advanced Türkiye is in certain fields. Free national AI. The government admin stuff you usually deal with painfully (letters, forms, offices), a lot of it from your phone. Not the postcard. The operating system underneath.
A national AI platform, and it is free for now
Last week, the Defence Industry Presidency opened EVREN. The name means “universe.” The explore page is public. You can look at the platform before you log in, and the login is e-Devlet. No credit card, no waitlist, no sales call.
Launch coverage described 11 open-weight large language models behind one OpenAI-compatible API, so existing code changes a base URL and keeps going. EVREN’s own site describes the machines as a cluster of 64 NVIDIA H200 GPUs inside the country. Prompts stay on that infrastructure. You can also do the unglamorous work on the same platform: upload a dataset, label it, train.
Through 1 November 2026, as announced at launch, API calls are not deducted from your credit balance. There are daily token quotas per account. You still pay nothing. That date is a window, not a promise that the window stays open.
This is the part I find most interesting. EVREN does not run on pay-per-token. It runs on a contribution model. Upload a useful dataset, label data, or share a model you trained, and you earn credits. The credits are GPU time for training and inference. They are not cash. You cannot withdraw them.
GPU time is the biggest cost line for most AI startups. A platform that lets you earn it turns that cost into a flywheel. Label data, train or run a model on the credits, and ship something that makes real money. The platform carries the infrastructure. The business on top of it is yours. I spend most of my time on what it takes for a company to become AI-native. The blocker is almost never the model. It is access, cost, and trust. EVREN is a country taking a swing at all three.
The state underneath
EVREN plugs in this cleanly because the identity layer was already there. e-Devlet is the government’s single digital gateway, and it is the thing the AI platform, and everything else here, sits on.
e-Devlet’s own statistics, through 31 July 2026, showed about 69.4 million registered users, in a country of about 86 million, and more than 9,000 services from that one login. Those counts move. The experience does not.
From your phone: pull an official document with a barcode anyone can verify, book a public hospital appointment and read the labs in e-Nabız, see a tax debt, and now log in to EVREN. One identity. A new service reaches people on day one.
I grew up around German bureaucracy. Letters in the mail. Forms. Waiting rooms. Deadlines you miss because the envelope sat under a pile. Here, a huge chunk of that life is an app. Not perfect. Still a different world.
Foreigners can get in too. A residence permit comes with a foreign identity number, and you pick up an e-Devlet password at a PTT branch with your residence card and passport. A few minutes, a few lira.
The rails are the new part
Identity first, then compute on top of it. Istanbul, a young technical workforce, and a time zone between Europe and Asia were already here. The rails are the new part.
And if all this has you thinking about moving here: since June, new residents with no Turkish tax ties in the previous three years pay no Turkish income tax on their foreign-sourced income for 20 years (Law No. 7582). Check it with a tax advisor before you plan around it, but it is worth knowing.
I am not writing a tourism brochure. I am writing from the place I actually live. Beautiful country. Kind people. And, quietly, some of the sharpest digital public infrastructure I have seen.
If you want to see the concrete piece, log in to EVREN before 1 November.
