TikTok ‘at an advanced stage of finalising a plan’ for second Irish data centre

TikTok said it would work with a third-party service provider to build the centre.

Rich Waterworth, TikTok’s general manager of European operations, said that this new centre is in addition to the site announced last year.

That site, which follows a €600m investment from the social media company, will be located within Echelon’s data centre campus in Clondalkin. It is set to go live later this year.

“Regarding local data storage, in line with the growth of our community, we're looking to expand our European data storage capacity,” Mr Waterworth said.

“We're also in talks to establish a third data centre in Europe to further complement our planned operations in Ireland. European TikTok user data will begin migrating this year, continuing into 2024,” he added.

TikTok is owned by Chinese company Bytedance and has faced scrutiny around its data collection practices.

In December, the US Senate passed a vote to ban federal employees from using the app on government owned devices following fears that data could be passed onto the Chinese government.

Mr Waterworth said that TikTok is focused on showing European users that their data is secure.

“We're continuing to deliver against the data governance strategy we set out for Europe last year, which includes further reducing employee access to European user data, minimising data flows outside of Europe; and storing European user data locally,” he said.

Last month, TikTok said it planned to lay off some recruitment staff based in its Dublin office.

The company, which employs 3,000 people in Ireland, has already started to cut recruitment jobs in the US.