• by Colin Kirkland , 9 hours ago

TikTok will invest around $1.2 billion in a new data center in Lahti, Finland -- its second data center in the nation -- where it will store the platform's European Union user information separately from China due to global privacy concerns.

According to TikTok's announcement, the company's data-center initiative in Finland marks a “continued expansion of secure digital infrastructure in Europe” via “Project Clover,” the ByteDance-owned company's $14 billion European data-sovereignty plan for over 200 million EU TikTok users.

“Once operational, the Lahti data center will strengthen our ability to support the default storage of European user data in Europe,” the announcement reads, citing “strict access controls” and “monitoring systems” overseen, checked and verified by the NCC Group, a global cybersecurity firm.

The data center will be located in the Kiveriö district of Lahti, TikTok’s announcement states, adding that the initiative aims to contribute to the regional economy by creating jobs and helping grow the local digital ecosystem.

TikTok's Lahti data center could be active by the second half of 2027 and will run on an initial capacity of 50 megawatts, with a total potential capacity of 128 megawatts.

This will be TikTok’s second data center in Finland, following a center in Kouvola that is expected to be operational by the end of 2026. Currently, TikTok's European user data is stored across three data centers in Norway, Ireland, and the U.S.

From its initial plans in 2023, a key aspect of Project Clover has involved data-access solutions called “security gateways” that monitor which TikTok employees are allowed to access certain European user data.

These were put in place after it was revealed last year that TikTok's parent company ByteDance had access to data from its global user base, sparking widespread government bans of the app on workers' devices and an eventual forming of a U.S. venture.

“We understand the skepticism. And that's precisely why we're not just doing the step of putting the data in Europe, building that digital barrier around it,” Theo Bertram, TikTok's former vice president of government relations and public policy, told Reuters in 2023. “We are taking the extra step of saying we know you're skeptical about us, and so we know we have to earn that trust.”