Norwegian ammunition maker Nammo has reported that it is unable to increase capacity due to the TikTok data center consuming too much electricity.
“We are worried that the growth we want to achieve will be hindered because of the cat video warehouse,” Morten Brandtzaeg, director of the company, which is partly owned by the Norwegian state and located in the southern region of Hamar, told the Financial Times on Sunday.
Brandtzaeg said demand for mortar shells had increased 15 times compared to normal due to the war between Russia and Ukraine. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said last week that the Ukrainian army was consuming between 4,000 and 7,000 mortar shells a day.
Brandtzaeg said that they wanted to increase their own production to support the Kiev administration, adding that TikTok’s newly constructed data center building could even use the additional capacity of electricity supplies in the region.
by using the same weapon, he argued, to make this impossible.
Elvia, the electricity distributor of the Hamar region, also reported that TikTok applied for the power increase before Nammo and that the power plant is already operating at full capacity. The company shared that it will take time to provide additional capacity.
TikTok did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian, one of the leading newspapers in the United Kingdom (UK).
TikTok, owned by China-based ByteDance, has been under scrutiny for some time, especially due to data theft allegations and the platform’s possible links to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before the US Congress on March 23, arguing that the platform was not linked to the CCP and that no data theft had taken place.
The UK government, the European Commission and the European Parliament have also banned employees from using TikTok on their phones.
The social media platform had announced that new facilities would be built to store the data of European users in local centers in order to restore its image damaged by these allegations.
On the other hand, these data centers are also on the agenda with their heavy electricity consumption. According to data from the European Commission, these facilities will account for 3.2 percent of total electricity consumption in the European Union by 2030. This corresponds to an increase of 18.5 percent compared to 2018.
