• TikTok to build a second data centre in Lahti, Finland, a year after political backlash around its first in Kouvola.
• €1 billion investment in Finland part of TikTok’s €12 billion European data sovereignty initiative.

TikTok is pressing ahead with a second TikTok data centre in Finland, announcing a €1 billion (US$1.16 billion) investment in a facility in Lahti, even as political controversy over its first Finnish site has yet to fully settle.

The Lahti data centre, located in southern Finland, will launch with an initial capacity of 50 megawatts and scale to a potential 128 MW. It is expected to be operational by 2027. TikTok’s first Finnish data centre in Kouvola – itself a €1 billion project – is still on track to go live by the end of this year. The back-to-back announcements put Finland at the centre of TikTok’s European infrastructure build-out. The company now has data centres operating in Norway and Ireland, with two more in the pipeline in a single country, one that was, until recently, openly questioning whether it wanted TikTok there at all.

Political resistance didn’t slow TikTok down

When Reuters revealed TikTok’s Kouvola plans in April last year, Finland’s then-minister of economic affairs, Wille Rydman, publicly urged TikTok’s local development partner to reconsider the deal, citing security concerns and what he described as a lack of transparency around the project.

Finland’s defence ministry had approved the investment in 2024, but elected officials said they had not been informed. That friction has not stopped Lahti’s mayor from welcoming the follow-up. “In the context of Lahti, the investment is substantial. We are pleased that a main tenant agreement has been signed and that the project is progressing as planned,” Mayor Niko Kyynarainen said in a statement.

The contrast says something about where the balance of power sits in these negotiations – between local interests, national economic instincts, and the scale of capital around hyperscale infrastructure.

Why Finland wins data centre investment

TikTok is not alone in choosing Finland. Microsoft and Google have both established data centre presence in the country, drawn by the same combination of cold climate, low-cost electricity, and a stable regulatory environment.

Finland’s data centre pipeline now reportedly runs to over 20 planned facilities, representing some €13 billion in value and 1.3 gigawatts in capacity, according to the Finnish Data Center Association.

Data sovereignty under pressure

The Lahti announcement sits in TikTok’s “Project Clover,” a €12 billion, decade-long initiative to keep European user data on European soil. The programme covers more than 200 million European users and is independently monitored by NCC Group, a cybersecurity firm brought in to provide third-party oversight of TikTok’s access controls.

The timing carries weight. ByteDance narrowly avoided a US ban in January after data protection concerns forced months of brinkmanship in Washington. In Europe, pressure on social media platforms over child safety and algorithmic design has intensified.

TikTok’s answer to both fronts has been infrastructure – plant the data close to regulators and keep building. Whether two Finnish data centres are enough to change any political calculus remains to be seen; offers of investment keep coming regardless.

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