Kouvola [a small city in Finland] needs all the jobs it can get. Young Finns who have not already left a small city so drab it could be stuck in the Soviet Union struggle to find work.
So when an international company called Hyperco announced it would exploit the freezing north’s temperatures and ready access to cold water to build a data centre in the area, there was general acceptance of it being a pretty good thing.
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All seemed well until last month, when the Finnish government learned what the first business to use the data centre would be.
TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media giant that is facing a global backlash over its control of users’ data and links to Beijing, announced it would invest €1 billion.
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The outcry was swift, not least among Finnish politicians who had banned the use of TikTok on their employees’ official devices over privacy fears. They asked how ByteDance, the firm with links to the Chinese state, had secured a foothold in Europe — and how nobody noticed when TikTok came to town.
The middle man
Around the time the scandal over the data centre began to hit home with Finland’s political classes, Elon Musk and his partner Shivon Zilis were at a White House breakfast posing for a photograph with a moustachioed billionaire called Hussain Sajwani.
More often to be found in Dubai where he has amassed a fortune in property, Sajwani is a longstanding ally of President Trump and built the commander-in-chief’s first golf course in the Middle East. More recently, though, he has worked with the White House on rolling out data centres across the United States through his company, Edgnex, the ultimate owner of Hyperco.
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Unlike President Biden, Trump has granted a reprieve to TikTok and delayed plans to force it to sell its US operation or face a ban in a country where it has 170 million users. “We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark’,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last month. “We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal.”
Sajwani, meanwhile, appears to be willing to work with nations otherwise shunned by the international community. His companies, for example, built infrastructure for the 2018 Winter Olympics in Sochi despite the international pariah status of President Putin.
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National security concerns are never far from the minds of people who live on the road that takes you from Finland’s capital, Helsinki, to the Russian border. Most people in the nation that has Europe’s longest border with Russia, and is on constant alert for aggression from Putin, never expected the most pressing threat to come from China.
It caught Wille Rydman, Finland’s minister for economic affairs, by surprise. The situation was “difficult”, he admitted last week, adding that “the customer does not necessarily need to be that particular company” without mentioning that company by name. Rydman, from the hard-right Finns Party, was less moderate this week, suggesting the facility might be used to circumvent sanctions designed to stop China procuring certain microchips.
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Ireland’s Data Protection Commission recently imposed a €530 million fine on the company for “transfers of personal data of users of the TikTok platform … to the People’s Republic of China”.
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