TikTok studies adding more data centers in Europe

 Chinese social media company TikTok is reportedly eyeing two more data centers in Europe, reflecting a possible relaxation on data privacy and regulatory crackdowns.

TikTok has struggled to resolve global government and regulatory concerns about user privacy, courtesy of its Chinese roots.

ByteDance Ltd , which owns TikTok, is looking to expand its data warehouse in Europe, Reuters reports , citing the blog post of Rich Waterworth, TikTok's managing director of European operations.

“We are in an advanced stage of finalizing a plan for a second data center in Ireland with a third-party service provider, in addition to the site announced last year,” he said.

“We are also in discussions to establish a third data center in Europe to further complement our planned operations in Ireland. Data from European TikTok users will start migrating this year and continue through 2024,” adds Waterworth.

TikTok reported an average of 125 million monthly active users in the EU between August 2022 and January 2023, subject to the strict content rules of the Digital Services Act (DSA).

The European Commission has given online platforms and search engines a deadline to publish their monthly active users.

The report adds that Twitter Inc has an average of 100.9 million monthly users in the EU.

Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) reported that the average monthly registered users were 278.6 million on Google Maps, 274.6 million on Google Play, 332 million on Google Search, 74.9 million on Shopping and 401.7 million on YouTube.

Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) had 255 million average monthly active users on Facebook in the EU and around 250 million average monthly active users on Instagram in the last six months of 2022.

The price movement

META shares were down 1.04% at $170.65 in premarket when last reviewed on Friday.