TikTok will increase its number of employees in Ireland to 1,100 by early 2021 from just 20 in January, the Chinese-owned video app said on Wednesday, a pace of expansion Ireland's foreign investment agency said was one of the fastest on record.

TikTok said its senior executive team for Europe, the Middle East and Africa is now based in Dublin, overseeing privacy and data protection for Europe. The 900 people currently employed in Ireland represent almost half of TikTok's 2,000 European staff.

The move comes as President Donald Trump and other American lawmakers have said TikTok is a national security risk and called for the divestment of the service in the United States, an order ByteDance filed an appeal over late on Tuesday.

The video app, owned by China's ByteDance, also announced in August that it will set up its first European data centre in Ireland, where tech giants such as Google, Facebook, and Apple have their European headquarters, benefiting from a low corporate tax rate of 12.5%.

(With input from agencies)