TikTok bets €1B on a second Finnish data centre in its European charm offensive
What's the deal? TikTok is investing €1 billion ($1.16 billion) to build a second data centre in Finland, in the Kiverio district of Lahti, a city of around 121,000 people in southern Finland. The facility will launch with 50 megawatts of capacity and could scale to 128 megawatts. Construction is expected to complete by 2027.
The investment is part of Project Clover, TikTok's €12 billion European data sovereignty programme designed to store and process the data of more than 200 million European users on European soil. TikTok's first Finnish data centre, in Kouvola, is due to come online by the end of 2026.
Why now? TikTok is under sustained pressure on both sides of the Atlantic. ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, narrowly avoided a US ban in January 2026 over data protection concerns. In Europe, governments have imposed restrictions on the app's use on government devices, and regulators are tightening scrutiny of social media platforms over children's safety — on the same day as the Lahti announcement, Greece said it would ban children under 15 from social media from January 2027.
Against that backdrop, committing billions to European infrastructure is as much a political calculation as a business one. Moving European user data off US-hosted servers and onto Finnish soil under independent oversight by cybersecurity firm NCC GroupDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → is TikTok's most concrete argument that it takes data sovereignty seriously.
What could go wrong? The political reception in Finland has been uneven. The country's defence ministry approved TikTok's first data centre in 2024 without informing elected politicians. Wille RydmanDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, then minister of economic affairs, publicly called for the project to be reconsidered, citing security concerns and a lack of transparency. The second announcement is likely to reignite that debate.
More broadly, Project Clover's premise — that physical infrastructure in Europe is sufficient to address data security concerns about a Chinese-owned platform — remains contested. Critics argue that ownership structure, not server location, is the fundamental issue, and no amount of Finnish concrete changes that.
The signal: TikTok's Finnish expansion is a microcosm of a broader trend: non-European tech giants racing to build physical infrastructure on the continent as a hedge against regulatory risk. Finland has become a hyperscale data centre hub, attracting Microsoft, Google, Equinix, and NebiusDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, thanks to its cool climate, stable grid, and near-100% renewable energy availability.
For TikTok, the stakes are higher than for most: every billion spent on European soil is an argument to regulators that the company is embedded in — and accountable to — the European digital economy. Whether that argument holds will ultimately be decided in Brussels and Washington, not Lahti.
Sources:
Reuters
Data Center Dynamics
Japan Times
Capacity
The Next Web
J.V.
