The new facility in Lahti is part of TikTok’s €12 billion Project Clover data sovereignty push for European users. Finland’s defence ministry approved the first data centre investment in 2024 without informing elected politicians. A former minister publicly called for the project to be reconsidered.
TikTok is investing €1 billion ($1.16 billion) to build a second data centre in Finland, the company announced on Wednesday. The new facility will be located in the Kiverio district of Lahti, a city of around 121,000 people 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, with the centre operational by 2027.
The Lahti investment is the second in Finland and part of Project Clover, TikTok’s €12 billion European data sovereignty programme 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 centre, in Kouvola, is due to come online by the end of 2026. European user data is currently held with enhanced safeguards across three sites in Norway, Ireland, and the United States. The company has positioned both Finnish investments as steps toward removing European data from US-hosted infrastructure entirely.
The announcement arrives at a complicated moment. ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, narrowly avoided a US ban in January over data protection concerns.
In Europe, regulators and governments are intensifying pressure on social media platforms over children’s safety, a dynamic that makes the company’s willingness to commit billions to European infrastructure both a business necessity and a political calculation.
On the same day TikTok announced the Lahti centre, Greece announced it would ban children under 15 from social media altogether from January 2027, with its prime minister explicitly calling on the EU to follow suit.
The political reception in Finland has been uneven. Finland’s defence ministry approved the first data centre investment in 2024 without informing elected politicians.
Wille Rydman, who was 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 Finland’s public broadcaster Yle that he hoped TikTok’s local property partner would reconsider whether it wanted TikTok as a tenant. The mayor of Lahti, Niko Kyynäräinen, took a different view, welcoming the investment as substantial for a city of its size.
Finland has become an increasingly popular location for hyperscale data centre investment, attracting major operators including Microsoft and Google, in part because of its cool climate, access to low-cost renewable energy, and stable regulatory environment.
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