Social media company TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, plans to open two more data centers in Europe in a move that could reduce concerns over the security of users’ data and ease regulatory pressure.
The short video-sharing app aims to expand its European data storage, TikTok’s general manager for operations in Europe Rich Waterworth said in a blog post. TikTok aims to convince that China will not access user data.
“We are at an advanced stage of finalizing a plan for a second data centre in Ireland with a third party service provider, in addition to the site announced last year,” Rich Waterworth said.
“We’re also in talks to establish a third data centre in Europe to complement our planned operations in Ireland. European TikTok user data will begin migrating this year, continuing into 2024,” Rich Waterworth said.
TikTok said it has 125 million monthly active users in EU between August 2022 to January 2023. It revealed the number of users as part of stricter EU online content rules known as the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The DSA labels companies with more than 45 million users as very large online platforms and require them to do risk management, external and independent auditing, share data with authorities and researchers and adopt a code of conduct.
The European Commission had given online platforms and search engines until Feb. 17 to publish their monthly active users. Very large online platforms have four months to comply with the rules or risk fines.
