The new facility in Lahti is part of TikTok’s €12 billion Clover project for data sovereignty for European users. The Finnish Ministry of Defense approved the first investment in a data center in 2024 without informing elected politicians. A former minister publicly called for the project to be reconsidered.
tiktok is investing 1 billion euros ($1.16 billion) to build a second data center in Finland, the company announced Wednesday. The new facilities will be located in the Kiverio district of Opena city of around 121,000 inhabitants in southern Finland.
It will have an initial capacity of 50 megawatts and a potential total capacity of 128 megawatts. Construction is expected to be completed within a year and the center will be operational in 2027.
Lahti’s investment is the second in Finland and is part of the Clover Project, TThe European ikTok data sovereignty program, valued at 12 billion euros designed to store and process the data of more than 200 million European users on European soil.
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TikTok’s first Finnish data center, in Kouvola, is scheduled to be operational by the end of 2026. European user data is currently held with enhanced safeguards at three sites in Norway, Ireland and the United States. The company has positioned both Finnish investments as steps toward completely removing European data from US-hosted infrastructure.
The announcement comes at a difficult time. ByteDanceTikTok’s Chinese parent company narrowly avoided a US ban in January over data protection concerns.
In Europe, regulators and governments are stepping up pressure on social media platforms over child safety, a dynamic that makes the company’s willingness to commit billions to European infrastructure as much a business necessity as a political calculation.
The same day TikTok announced the Lahti center, Greece announced that it would ban entry to children under 15 years of age of social media from January 2027, and its prime minister explicitly asked the EU to do the same.
The political reception in Finland has been mixed. The Finnish Ministry of Defense approved the first investment in a data center in 2024 without informing elected politicians.
Wille Rydman, then Minister of Economic Affairs, publicly called for the project to be “reconsidered” when it became public, citing security concerns and what he described as a lack of transparency around the company’s plans.
Rydman told Finnish public broadcaster Yle that he hoped TikTok’s local real estate partner would reconsider whether it wanted TikTok as a tenant. The mayor of Lahti, Niko Kyynäräinen, had a different opinion and considered the investment to be substantial for a city of its size.
Finland has become an increasingly popular location for hyperscale data center investment, attracting major operators including Microsoft and Google, in part due to its cool climate, access to low-cost renewable energy and stable regulatory environment.
