An arms manufacturer located in Norway cannot expand its facilities due to the presence of a TikTok data center nearby.
While TikTok has probably just signed its death warrant in the United States after its CEO’s recent statements before the US Congress, a new controversy has just emerged.
As reported by our colleagues from FinancialTimesa social network data center located in Norway is causing problems in an unexpected area: the supply of arms to the Ukrainian forces.
To sum up, the Norwegian arms giant Nammo wants to expand its production site to accelerate the manufacture of weapons and equipment for kyiv. No wonder, since in one year, the orders placed by the EU in armament have been multiplied by 15.
An arms factory can’t grow because of TikTok
Only, this extension project meets unexpected resistance: a TikTok datacenter, located not far from the weapons site. Here is the problem : social network data center consume huge amount of electricity.
And for the local energy supplier, namely Elvia, it is currently impossible to supply electricity to the data center and the future extension of the weapons site. For its part, Elvia does not intend to reduce the amount of energy provided to the data center, arguing that it respects the principle of “first come, first served”.
Also read: TikTok – the BBC wants to ban the application from pro phones
Nammo’s CEO worries about the presence of this data center
For Morten Brandtzaeg, CEO of Nammo, TikTok would not have chosen this location by chance. You have to read between the lines here, the CEO referring to the suspicions of espionage of which the social network has been accused for months.
“I do not exclude that it is not by pure coincidence that this activity is close to a defense company… I cannot exclude it”, he believes. For the industrialist, there is only one solution: that the Norwegian government legislate for prioritize access to energy for essential industries such as armaments.
“For Europe, this is a major concern: critical industries must have access to energy”, he concludes. As a reminder, TikTok, Netflix and even Candy Crush have just been banned from the smartphones of civil servants in France, for cybersecurity reasons. This decision was confirmed by the Minister of Transformation and the Public Service Stanislas Guerini.
