Popular short-video app TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance is preparing to invest about $499 million to set up its first European data center in Ireland.
In a TikTok blog post, the organization’s global chief information security officer Roland Cloutier remarked that data center in Ireland is expected to create hundreds of new jobs, enable faster loading time and safely store European users’ data.
“This data center signals our long-term commitment to Ireland and we expect the data center to open and be operational by early 2022,” Cloutier said.
Ireland is one of Europe’s biggest hubs for data centers and hosts operations for major technology companies such as Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet Inc’s Google.
ByteDance has been speaking to British authorities as it is considering moving TikTok’s headquarters overseas, with an intention of relocating to London.
TikTok is also in talks with American software technology giant Microsoft about selling its U.S. operations as U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to ban the service on the home soil citing national security risks. President Trump said he will ban the service in the United States on Sept. 15 if there was no sale.
