TikTok to invest €1.2 billion in data centers in Europe

Wednesday, March 8, TikTok video service announced that he is investing €1.2 billion in the construction of data centers in Europe. The company will open three data centers in the region: two in Ireland and one in Norway. The transfer of data from European users there will begin this year and continue next year. According to the service itself, it has more than 150 million users in Europe.

According to TikTok, the company’s goals are to store data in the region where users are located, minimize the transfer of data from this region to others, and also reduce the ability of employees to access user data. TikTok’s announcement comes as US and EU authorities are increasingly concerned about whether Chinese authorities can access data from TikTok users in those regions, as the service is owned by China’s ByteDance. At the end of February, the European Commission banned employees to use TikTok on company smartphones, a previously similar solution accepted American authorities. The service itself has already stated that it stores data of foreign users not in China, but in the United States and Singapore, and that the Chinese authorities do not have access to this information.

Yana Rozhdestvenskaya