TikTok servers are now up and running in all three data centers at Green Mountain’s OSL2-Hamar campus in Norway. This is part of Project Clover, a €12 billion ($13.2 billion) initiative to keep European users’ data within Europe and meet European security standards, Datacenter Dynamics reports. As part of Project Clover, the company also uses a data center in Ireland, which opened in 2023.
Green Mountain’s plans to provide the social network with new data centers were announced in March 2023. The first of them was supposed to be operational in the second quarter of 2024, but in the end the partners had to deviate from the plans somewhat – European data began to move to the new campus only in October-November 2024. In the summer of the same year, a Green Mountain representative stated that the project implementation was slowed down due to problems with obtaining permits for a new electrical substation.
After all three data centers in Norway were up and running, TikTok hired European company NCC Group to independently check and verify the security of data storage, processing and transmission, saying that such a level of transparency is unattainable for other online platforms. The social network is also working with Green Mountain to transfer heat from the data centers to local facilities. About 200 people had to be hired to service the three data centers, including IT specialists, electricians and experts in cooling systems.
Image Source: Green Mountain
Meanwhile, last Friday, the US President issued an executive order extending the social network’s operation in the US for another 75 days so that it could be “honestly” sold to an American business – we are talking about selling the American part of the network under the pretext of protecting the privacy of American data. Since 2022, as part of Project Texas, the data of American users is stored only on Oracle servers.