The Bytedance Data Center is located in Quzhou in, China. It has 10 data halls, one of which is the largest in Asia. The data center contains a total of 24.5M square feet. Given that the company announced its plans in October 2017, it took four months for this giant data center to be built.
China is a country that contributes to the enormous pollution in the world and is the largest importer of coal from Indonesia. So, does the data center used by Bytedance use coal while more and more users are dancing on the platform?
Bytedance Data Center Is Half a Step to Become a Green Data Center
In February 2017, Bytedance announced plans to build a new $209 million data center in Wuzhen, where it already has its headquarters. The 8 MWh facility will be powered by a biomass-fueled generator and cooled by lake water (a practice known as “thermal cooling”). To minimize power loss and boost efficiency, the servers will be close together rather than spread out across different rooms. And at 350 meters from the lake, the building will be airtight and naturally insulated from the outside temperature. These practices are meant to reduce energy use drastically.
The Wuzhen data center should become operational later this year. If all goes according to plan, it will come online with an efficiency rate of 93%—the highest rate possible for a traditional coal-fired facility in China today.
In addition, Bytedance data center has made efforts to reduce its waste, including a plan to recycle all of its leftover water through wastewater treatment facilities. Although these are reasonable steps forward, Bytedance data cener is still working on reducing its carbon footprint—the company says it’s the first time it’s released information about its carbon emissions.
Bytedance Data Center in Europe
Bytedance, the creator of the popular video app TikTok, has created a new data center in Europe. This new data center is located in Sweden and has cost over $300 million to build. This data center’s primary purpose is to improve users’ experience.
By having a data center closer to most of their user base, they can have quicker loading times and an overall better experience for their users. This will also enable them to expand rapidly and increase their user base to grow their company and reach more people worldwide.
The data center has been certified by different organizations, including:
- ISO 27001 Information Security Management System
- CBORD UL Data Center Certification (DC-1)
- China National Level III Energy Efficient Building Certification
Moreover, Bytedance has teamed up with Datacore, a leading data center, and cloud hosting solution provider in China. The cooperation allows Bytedance to focus on its core competency of providing high-quality mobile internet services to users worldwide instead of investing in building a data center from scratch.
Read also: Climate Neutral Data Centre Best Practices and Challenges.
Bytedance’s European Data Center uses the latest technology to provide reliable customer service. Using best-in-class products from Cisco, NetApp, Juniper Networks, Dell/EMC, and other leading vendors, we can scale up or down our Data Centers quickly and efficiently.
How much does TikTok spend on Data Centers?
The data center is the first phase of the entire project, and it’s already been completed. The project will have a capacity of 4 million square feet and will be finished by 2020. By 2020, Bytedance will spend $2 billion to build a new headquarters with a 6 million square feet capacity. It also means that within two years (in 2019), Bytedance will have another $1 billion to spend on its new headquarters.
TikTok already has data centers in India, China, Brazil, and Germany. The proposed investment will make Ireland home to TikTok’s newest facility; however, the company has yet to confirm where it will be located within Ireland’s borders.
TikTok has a contract with Interxion to lease two data center floors in Dublin, Ireland. The contract period is for five years, and the total amount paid is €3.5 million over those five years. That works out to be a monthly amount of €360,000.
TikTok updates at a glance
TikTok is a video-sharing and social networking app owned by ByteDance, a Chinese technology company. By the end of Q1 of 2018, it had 500 million users. In the United States, it was ranked at no. 40 in the App Store and on Google Play as of April 2019. As of December 2018, TikTok had over 500 million users, with 90% living outside China.
In May 2017, TikTok received $1 billion from Tencent Holdings Limited for a majority stake in the company. The deal placed a $75 million pre-money valuation on the company and brought its total funding to $1.4 billion as of May 2017. At the same time, TikTok has been empowering the digital transformation for SMEs in South-East Asia with the TikTok Shop.
The majority stake acquisition by Tencent has led to concerns that TikTok would be integrated into Tencent’s social media products, such as WeChat or QQ, leading to censorship and deletion of content that violates the rules of these platforms. Tencent has been widely criticized for tightening censorship in China; the company has been accused of using its dominance in messaging apps to prevent users from sharing politically sensitive information or memes that mock Chinese authorities.
The company reported losses of $1 billion in 2018 due to increased spending on data centers and other operating costs needed to support its rapid growth. The company’s user base has grown from 100 million users in 2017 to more than 500 million. That equates to about 3-6% of the total global social media population of 2.6 billion users—and it’s still proliferating.
However, TikTok is still unprofitable by Western standards because most of its revenue comes from China, where advertising rates are much lower than in other major markets.
Conclusion
You simultaneously contribute little global emissions when you dance and shake jellyfish on TikTok. The reason is that Bytedance’s data center has yet to use renewable energy fully.
Especially for Tencent’s data center in Indonesia, of course, use electricity from coal and diesel generators. Therefore, the time is now for TikTok to start thinking about environmental sustainability. Because if many people are poisoned by pollution and washed away by floods, there will be fewer and fewer people dancing on TikTok.
The green data center is part of Bytedance’s more tremendous efforts in environmental protection. In addition to building a large solar farm in northern Beijing. A waste heat recovery system will be added to the new data center to recycle waste heat from servers into cooling water.
To ensure that the company’s commitment to sustainability extends beyond construction and operation, Bytedance has launched an internal incentive system that encourages employees to take action on eco-friendly ideas.