Social media firm TikTok has begun moving its European user data to its new data center in Norway.
Part of the "Project Clover" effort, TikTok's €12 billion data migration effort to ensure that European user data is housed within its European enclave of data centers.
TikTok reports that the first building of its Norwegian data center campus is now operational, and is the second of its European facilities to come online. The first was in Ireland, and came online in 2023.
The Norwegian campus - OSL2-Hamar - is being provided by Green Mountain, a partnership that was announced in March 2023. The initial contract was for 90MW of capacity across three buildings, with the possibility of expanding up to 150MW by 2025.
The first data center building was handed over to TikTok in December 2023 with 30MW of capacity and was planned to go live by Q2 2024. In an interview with DCD, Green Mountain's CEO Svein Atle Hagaseth said that the project had been slowed due to delays in getting approval for a new substation.
Owned by Chinese company ByteDance, several countries have raised concerns about TikTok and data privacy. In the US, a law has been passed that could force ByteDance to sell its regional operations to a local company or face a full ban. Oracle was previously touted as a potential buyer, as was Microsoft.
In an attempt to alleviate some of these data privacy concerns for EU countries, TikTok launched “Project Clover.”
In addition to TikTok commencing data migration efforts to Norway, the company has also shared that independent security provider NCC Group has begun "continuous monitoring of the security gateway environments that provide additional protection to our European data."
Earlier this month, reports emerged that TikTok was looking to open a data center in Thailand. In June the company revealed it was opening an AI hub in Malaysia at a cost of RM10 billion ($2.13bn). It is also reportedly considering whether to set up a data center in Australia to support workloads across the Asia Pacific region.
TikTok has a US data center in Texas managed by Oracle.
