Tesla today announced a new data center in China in order to keep data collected from vehicles in the country locally.
The news comes after the government banned Tesla cars from more locations over data collection concerns.
Earlier this year, we reported on Tesla facing some challenges in China regarding its data collection from the cameras in its vehicles.
The People’s Liberation Army, China’s military, issued a notice banning Tesla owners from parking their vehicles on bases and in housing complexes.
The concerns appeared to be related to Tesla’s use of cameras all around its vehicles and where the data is going.
CEO Elon Musk even commented on the story by stating the obvious: “Tesla is not using its vehicles’ cameras to spy on China,” but it didn’t seem to alleviate the concerns as even more government entities reportedly told employees not to park their Tesla vehicles on government property.
Following those situations, Tesla announced last month that it will store all data collected in China locally.
Today, the automaker delivered on the promise and announced that it has established a local data center.
Tesla issued the announcement via its official Weibo account (translated from Chinese):
Tesla is honored to have discussions with industry experts on the “Several Provisions on the Management of Automotive Data Security (Draft for Comment).” We firmly support the standardized development of the industry.
We have established a data center in China to achieve data storage localization, and will continue to add more local data centers. All data generated from the sales of vehicles in the Chinese mainland market will be stored in China.
At the same time, we will open the vehicle information query platform to car owners. This work is in full swing, and the details and progress will be reported to you one after another. Thank you for your support. We will work hard to continuously improve the user experience.
Car data security is very important. We firmly believe that unified and standardized management will be more conducive to the orderly and long-term development of smart cars. Tesla will make every effort to implement car data security management to ensure data security. Thank you everyone!
The automaker didn’t elaborate on where in China the data center is located.
As for the comment about opening vehicle data to car owners, Tesla previously announced this new platform just a few weeks ago, but not much is known about it.
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