To grow its e-commerce business, TikTok will invest billions of dollars in Southeast Asia.

As it doubles down on the area despite increasing international scrutiny over its data security, China’s ByteDance, the owner of the short video app TikTok, said on Thursday that it will spend billions of dollars in Southeast Asia over the next years.
Southeast Asia, which has a population of 630 million people, half of whom are under 30, is one of TikTok’s largest user markets, bringing in more than 325 million monthly users.