As TikTok continues to expand its data center requirements across the Asia Pacific, a report in The Information indicates that the social media platform is in discussion with suppliers about its potential move and requirement for increased workloads across the Asia Pacific.
This includes consideration of whether it should launch a data center in Australia. The overall strategy is still very much in the early stages of consideration. No plans have yet been finalized and they could take many years to happen.
The drivers behind the rapid expansion of TikTok’s data center requirement over recent years include both the need to meet growing demand for its services but also to help overcome some concerns held by governments in the region about the data collected in their markets being sent to China.
In the US, this concern led to former President Trump attempting to block the company. TikTok started to move out of the considerable data center footprint it was using and moving to Oracle Cloud . That initiative has not been successful as President Biden declaring that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance was required to sell the US division of TikTok or shut down operations within nine months.
That fight is continuing as ByteDance claims that no data from users in the United States has been sent to China. The DoJ has countered, alleging that it had proof that such data was being stored on China-based servers.
