TikTok Get Blamed for Guzzling Energy in Norway

TikTok are being blamed for being an energy-guzzler! 

 

At Raufoss (about 120 kilometers north of Oslo in Norway), a weapons firm co-owned by the Norwegian government and a Finnish state-controlled defence company, said they can’t meet the surging demand for artillery shells because a TikTok data center there is using up the electricity! 

 

Elvia, the local energy company, confirmed that the electricity network has no spare capacity after promising it to the data center as they allocate it on a first come, first served basis. 

 

Experts say fights over which companies and which type of industry get priority access to electricity grids are likely to increase across Europe. Data centres have flourished in the Nordic countries because of once-plentiful and cheap electricity, as well as a colder climate that keeps cooling costs down. 

 

“We are concerned because we see our future growth is challenged by the storage of cat videos", Morten Brandtzæg, the CEO of Nammo AS, said in an interview with the Financial Times. (I guess he doesn't like cats!)

 

Brandtzæg said that the demand for artillery rounds was 15 times higher than normal – a trend driven by the war in Ukraine, which has featured heavy artillery use. Ukraine, for instance, would like to increase its daily usage of rounds from 6,000 to 65,000, he explained. 

 

It isn’t known if Nammo shells are being used in Ukraine – their customer base, as described in a 2021 annual report, is overwhelmingly EU and NATO states, which have been making huge donations to Ukraine since Russia launched its Special Military Operation. 

 

TikTok and other tech giants have faced criticism for their energy use. Back in July, a report from the FT found that the electricity usage of large companies – including Microsoft, Oracle, LG, Huawei, Amazon, and Dell – was making it harder to build more homes in London, UK. Due to the electricity grid running out of capacity, the report stated that the capital could face a ban on new housing projects until 2035. 

 

An earlier report from 2019 by EirGrid, Ireland's electrical grid operator, found similar conclusions for Ireland, which is a popular base for global companies' European data centers. It found that data centers can often require the "same amount of energy as a large town", and could account for "29% of electricity demand in Ireland by 2028".