Social media group TikTok plans to open two more data centers in Europe, Rich Waterworth, TikTok’s general manager of European operations, said on Friday, Reuters and Agerpres reported.

TikTok seeks to reassure governments and regulators that the Chinese Communist Party or other Beijing-influenced organizations cannot access users’ personal data or manipulate content.

TikTok, owned by Chinese tech conglomerate ByteDance, wants to expand its data storage facilities in Europe, Waterworth wrote in his blog.

“We are in the advanced stages of finalizing a plan to establish a second data center in Ireland involving third party service providers in addition to the center announced last year. We are also discussing the establishment of a third data center in Europe to complement our planned operations in Ireland. The data of European TikTok users will start migrating this year and this process will continue until 2024,” said Waterworth.

How many TikTok users are there in the European Union?

On Friday, the company reported an average of 125 million monthly active users in the EU between August 2022 and January 2023 to comply with the Digital Services Act (DSA), which includes tougher EU rules on online content.

According to the DSA, companies with more than 45 million users are considered extremely large online platforms and must carry out risk management operations, external and independent audits, share data with authorities and researchers, and adopt a code of ethics.

Online platforms and search engines must publish the number of active users for the month by February 17. Extremely large online platforms have four months to comply with EU regulations or face fines.

On Thursday, Twitter announced that it has an average of 100.9 million monthly active users in the EU, based on estimates from the past 45 days. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, reported that the average monthly number of users connected to Google Maps was 278.6 million, to Google Play – 274.6 million, to Google Search – 332 million, to Shopping – 74.9 million and to YouTube – 401.7 million

And Meta Platform recently announced that it had an average of 255 million monthly active users on Facebook and an average of around 250 million monthly active users on Instagram in the last six months of 2022 in the EU.

Tensions between the Chinese company and the EU

Last month, TikTok CEO Shou Ji-chu met in Brussels with EU officials, including Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner and executive vice-president for a Europe fit for the digital age.

The head of TikTok sought to reassure the EU that it would respect the bloc’s rules and commitments on children’s privacy and safety.

Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for the internal market, threatened on January 20 after this meeting that the TikTok platform could be banned in the EU if it did not speed up its efforts to comply with EU law by September.

“We will not hesitate to enact a full range of sanctions to protect our citizens if audits do not show full compliance,” Breton said.

Pressure on TikTok increased after it admitted in December that some of its employees had improperly accessed the TikTok user data of two journalists in an effort to determine the source of the information leaked to the media.

“The younger the audience, the greater the responsibility. It is unacceptable that users need only a few seconds behind seemingly innocuous and fun devices to access harmful, sometimes life-threatening content,” Breton said.

He added that “DSA includes dissuasive sanctions, including an EU ban in the event of serious repeated violations that threaten the life or safety of people.”