Aselsan Defense Companies Defense Policy & Strategy

ASELSAN to Build Second Major Technology Campus in Malatya

ASELSAN is building a second major production and technology campus in Malatya, a city in eastern Türkiye still recovering from the 2023 earthquakes, with the first of five planned factories due to open in August 2027. Malatya’s parliamentary deputy Abdurrahman Babacan announced the project, saying land across from the current Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) building in the city has been allocated to ASELSAN and that some production in the Organized Industrial Zone is already under way.

The announcement came from a sitting member of parliament rather than from ASELSAN itself or from Türkiye’s Presidency of Defence Industries (SSB), so figures that would normally accompany a corporate investment announcement — total project cost, projected employment, and a construction schedule beyond the first facility’s 2027 target — have not been made public. The scale described, a 66-hectare site holding five separate plants, would make it comparable in footprint to some of ASELSAN’s existing production clusters around Ankara, where the company is headquartered.

Part of a Post-Earthquake Industrial Push

Babacan tied the project to an investment programme President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered after the February 2023 earthquakes that devastated Malatya and ten other provinces in southeastern Türkiye, killing more than 50,000 people across the country. The policy aim, as described by Babacan, is to use strategic defence-industry investment as a lasting driver of economic development in the earthquake zone rather than relying solely on reconstruction spending, which fades once housing and infrastructure repairs are complete.

ASELSAN is Türkiye’s largest defence electronics company, and moving production work outside the capital is not new for it; the firm has spent the past several years opening specialised facilities such as its $56 million guided-weapons production plant and has separately pursued production arrangements abroad, including plants it is building outside Türkiye entirely. The Malatya project differs from both: it is domestic, and according to Babacan it is intended to relocate some of the company’s more advanced capabilities — electronic circuit boards, chip-related work, and software infrastructure — away from Ankara rather than simply adding assembly capacity.

Logistics Still Catching Up

A defence-electronics campus in inland Malatya needs a way to move finished products to port for export, and that piece of the plan is not yet built. Türkiye’s Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure is working on a high-speed rail line between Narlı and the Mediterranean port of İskenderun specifically to give Malatya-made goods an export route; no completion date for that line has been announced. Until it is finished, products from the new campus would need to move by road to reach a port, adding cost and time that a purpose-built rail link is meant to remove.

Babacan also said the Malatya push is meant to help reverse the region’s brain drain by giving locally trained engineers and technicians a reason to stay, and that a separate company based in Muğla has made its own investment decision tied to the same regional development effort, though no further detail on that investment was given.

An Unconfirmed ANKA-3 Order Is a Separate Story

Coverage of ASELSAN’s Malatya plans in Turkish media has sometimes appeared alongside reports about a new order for TUSAŞ’s ANKA-3 stealth drone, but the two are separate items from different companies. TUSAŞ opened a second ANKA-3 production line after the Turkish order for the jet-powered flying-wing drone reached 80 aircraft in October — a figure that has already been reported and is unrelated to ASELSAN’s electronics campus in Malatya. Readers should not treat the two as a single combined announcement.

Why a Second Campus Matters

ASELSAN has been adding capacity through 2026 to work through a domestic and export order book that has grown long enough that delivery queues now stretch years for some systems, and Ankara’s existing industrial zones have practical limits on how much more floor space, skilled labour and housing they can absorb. Spreading production to a second city lets the company grow capacity without competing for the same land and workers it already relies on in the capital, while serving the government’s stated goal of anchoring high-value industry in earthquake-affected provinces. Türkiye’s own 2027 budget plan already proposes a sharp increase in defence procurement spending, and new plants such as Malatya’s are the physical capacity that would be needed to execute an expanding budget rather than just approve one on paper.

The project remains at an early stage. There is no ASELSAN or SSB statement confirming the investment figure, the total employment target, or a completion date for anything beyond the first of the five planned factories.