Ireland fines TikTok 530 million euros for sending EU user data to China
The TikTok logo is seen outside the Chinese video app company’s Los Angeles offices on April 4, 2025 in Culver City, California.
Robyn Beck | AFP via Getty Images
TikTok has been fined 530 million euros ($601.3 million) by Ireland’s privacy regulator for sending user data to China.
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) — which leads on privacy oversight for TikTok in the EU — said Friday that TikTok infringed the bloc’s GDPR data protection law over transfers of European user data to China.
The regulator ordered TikTok to bring its data processing into compliance within six months and said it would suspend TikTok’s transfers to China if processing is not brought into compliance within that timeframe.
“TikTok’s personal data transfers to China infringed the GDPR because TikTok failed to verify, guarantee and demonstrate that the personal data of EEA users, remotely accessed by staff in China, was afforded a level of protection essentially equivalent to that guaranteed within the EU,” Graham Doyle, deputy commissioner at the DPC, said in a statement Friday.
“As a result of TikTok’s failure to undertake the necessary assessments, TikTok did not address potential access by Chinese authorities to EEA personal data under Chinese anti-terrorism, counter-espionage and other laws identified by TikTok as materially diverging from EU standards,” he added.
The DPC said it also found TikTok had provided inaccurate information to its inquiry when it claimed it hadn’t stored European users’ data on servers located in China. TikTok informed the regulator this month that it discovered an issue in February where limited European user data had been stored on servers in China, contrary to its prior statements.
The DPC takes the issue “very seriously” and is considering what further regulatory action may be warranted in consultation with its fellow EU data protection authorities, Doyle said.
TikTok said it disagrees with the Irish regulator’s decision and plans to appeal in full.
In a blog post Friday, Christine Grahn, TikTok’s head of public policy and government relations for Europe, said the decision failed to take into account Project Clover, a 12-billion-euro data security initiative aimed at protecting European user data.
“It instead focuses on a select period from years ago, prior to Clover’s 2023 implementation and does not reflect the safeguards now in place,” Grahn said.
“The DPC itself recorded in its report what TikTok has consistently said: it has never received a request for European user data from the Chinese authorities, and has never provided European user data to them,” she added.
TikTok has previously acknowledged that staff in China can access user data.
In 2022, it said in an update to its privacy policy that employees in countries where it operates — including China, Brazil, Canada and Israel — are permitted access to users’ data to ensure their experience is “consistent, enjoyable and safe.”
Western policymakers and regulators are concerned TikTok’s transfers of user data could lead to Beijing accessing the data to spy on users with the app. Under Chinese law, tech companies are required to hand over user data to the Chinese government if requested to assist with vaguely-defined “intelligence work.”
For its part, TikTok has insisted that it has never sent user data to the Chinese government. In 2023, TikTok boss Shou Zi Chew said in written testimony for a U.S. Congress hearing that the app “has never shared, or received a request to share, U.S. user data with the Chinese government.”
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., during the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025.
Stefani Reynolds | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In the weeks leading up to Nvidia’s third-quarter earnings report, investors debated whether the markets were in an AI bubble, fretting over the massive sums being committed to building data centers and whether they could provide a long-term return on investment.
During Wednesday’s earnings call with analysts, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang began his comments by rejecting that premise.
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Huang said. “From our vantage point we see something very different.”
In many respects, Huang’s remarks are to be expected. He’s leading the company at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom, and has built its market cap to $4.5 trillion because of soaring demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units.
Huang’s smackdown of bubble talk matters because Nvidia counts every major cloud provider — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle — as a customer. Most of the major AI model developers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Meta, are also big buyers of Nvidia GPUs.
Huang has deep visibility into the market, and on the call he offered a three-pronged argument for why we’re not in a bubble.
First, he said that areas like data processing, ad recommendations, search systems, and engineering, are turning to GPUs because they need the AI. That means older computing infrastructure based around the central processor will transition to new systems running on Nvidia’s chips.
Second, Huang said, AI isn’t just being integrated into current applications, but it will enable entirely new ones.
Finally, according to Huang, “agentic AI,” or applications that can run without significant input from the user, will be able to reason and plan, and will require even more computing power.
In making the case of Nvidia, Huang said it’s the only company that can address the three use cases.
“As you consider infrastructure investments, consider these three fundamental dynamics,” Huang said. “Each will contribute to infrastructure growth in the coming years.”
Reversing the slide
In its earnings release, Nvidia reported revenue and profit that sailed past estimates and issued better-than-expected guidance. Last month, Huang provided a $500 billion forecast for sales of the company’s AI chips over calendar 2025 and 2026.
The company said on Wednesday that its order backlog didn’t even include a few recent deals, like an agreement with Anthropic that was announced this week or the expansion of a deal with Saudi Arabia.
“The number will grow,” CFO Colette Kress said on the call, saying the company was on track to hit the forecast.
Prior to Wednesday’s results, Nvidia shares were down about 8% this month. Other stocks tied to the AI have gotten hit even harder, with CoreWeave plunging 44% in November, Oracle dropping 14% and Palantir falling 17%.
Some of the worry on Wall Street has been tied to the debt that certain companies have used to finance their infrastructure buildouts.
“Our customers’ financing is up to them,” Huang said.
Specific to Nvidia, investors have raised concerns in recent weeks about how much of the company’s sales were going to a small number of hyperscalers.
Last month, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet all lifted their forecasts for capital expenditures due to their AI buildouts, and now collectively expect to spend more than $380 billion this year.
Huang said that even without a new business model, Nvidia’s chips boost hyperscaler revenue, because they power recommendation systems for short videos, books, and ads.
People will soon start appreciating what’s happening underneath the surface of the AI boom, Huang said, versus “the simplistic view of what’s happening to capex and investment.”
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