Social media giant TikTok is rumored to be spending €1 billion ($1.14 billion) on its first data center in Finland, Reuters reports. A company spokesperson confirmed the information, but did not specify whether TikTok plans to build its own data center or lease a third-party facility. The company also did not disclose the exact location of the data center, its capacity, or the construction timeline.
In 2023, TikTok’s parent company, China’s ByteDance, began implementing the so-called Project Clover. This initiative envisages moving European user data to servers located in the European Union in response to concerns expressed by local lawmakers. In the US, a similar project, Project Texas, to move data to the Oracle cloud did not save the company from government persecution.
As part of Project Clover, TikTok has taken over the entire Norwegian campus of Green Mountain OSL2-Hamar. The plans were announced back in March 2023, the first data center was completed in December of the same year, and its commissioning was scheduled for the second quarter of 2024. However, the company only began migrating European data to the new campus in October of the same year. The company has also had a data center in Ireland since 2023. The company is also considering building a data center in Brazil and has promised to spend $8.8 billion on digital infrastructure in Thailand.
Image source: Vincent Guth/unspalsh.com
But TikTok’s future in the US remains in question. ByteDance has literally been ordered to abandon operations in the country by selling the US part of its business. Otherwise, the app will simply be disabled for US users for reasons of “national security.” At the same time, there is not a single company that has entered into an agreement to buy the business, although many have reportedly expressed interest and even tested the waters regarding the possible lease of a data center in the US.