Social media app TikTok will soon add two new data centers in Europe to alleviate the mounting pressure from the government and further assure the public that China's Communist Party (CCP) is not harvesting user data.
TikTok Europe Operations General Manager Rich Waterworth states in a blog post, "We are at 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."
Waterworth adds, "We're also in talks to establish a third data center in Europe to complement our planned operations in Ireland further. European TikTok user data will begin migrating this year, continuing into 2024."
On Friday, TikTok reported that it has a monthly 125 million active users in Europe alone from August last year to January. This total number of users qualified TikTok to be subject to the Digital Services Act (DSA), Europe's stricter rules for digital content.
The DSA requires companies with a user base higher than 45 million to apply a more extensive risk mitigation process and external third-party auditing. Additionally, they must give the authorities and researchers access to the data and follow a strict code of conduct.
Social media companies and digital platforms can submit monthly active users to the European Commission until February 17. More giant corporations have a grace period of 4 months to meet the requirements. Failure to comply will result in heavy fines.
Alphabet, Google's parent company, shared two data sets for the monthly active users, reasoning that users can still use their services and tools even without logging into their accounts.
Google estimates its monthly active users as 401.7M for YouTube, 332M for Google Search, 278.6M for Google Maps, 274.6M for Google Play, and 74.9M when it comes to shopping.
Twitter announced on Thursday that it roughly had 100.9M monthly active users estimated from the previous 45 days.
Meanwhile, Meta disclosed an average monthly active user of 255M on Facebook and almost 250M on Instagram based on the data from the latter half of 2022.
