Digital borders now force global apps to store data in local warehouses
Technology
To keep your social media feed legal, tech giants are building massive, water-cooled fortresses in the Finnish wilderness to lock data behind national borders.
Digital borders are becoming as rigid as physical ones as countries demand that their citizens' data never leaves the country. Under an initiative called Project Clover, TikTok is spending 12 billion euros to move the personal habits of 200 million Europeans into local warehouses. One such facility in Lahti, Finland, uses massive liquid-cooling systems to keep its servers from melting while they process a petabyte of data every single second.