Report: TikTok plans to build €1 billion data centre in Finland
TikTok has over 175 million users in Europe. In 2023, it launched a new data security regime called “Project Clover,” with plans to invest €12 billion over 10 years, to address concerns over data security.
TikTok, owned by Chinese firm Bytedance, plans to invest 1 billion euros (about USD 1.14 billion) to build its first data centre in Finland, according to a report by Reuters.
Concerns in North America and Western Europe over whether user TikTok data can be accessed by the Chinese government have continued despite the company’s attempts to address the issue.
TikTok has more than 175 million users in Europe. In 2023, it launched a new data security regime called “Project Clover,” with plans to invest €12 billion over 10 years.
The US Center for Strategic & International Studies in October 2024 highlighted concerns that the Chinese Communist Party potentially could be influencing TikTok’s users by controlling user feeds, suppressing dissent, or spreading disinformation.
Though TikTok’s data collection practices such as collecting personal information and browsing history are standard practices for other social media platforms too, US officials are worried about the potential for misuse by foreign actors.
While the US has threatened to ban the popular social media app, the European Commission has told staff not to use it on their official phones.
TikTok claims the concerns are baseless as European user data is stored in a dedicated European data enclave, with the data hosted across data centres in Norway, Ireland and the US, according to the Reuters report.
Over 20 new data centres are being planned in Finland, amounting to about 13 billion euros in value and 1.3 GW in capacity, according to Veijo Terho, chairman of the Finnish Data Centre Association, the Reuters report said.