Photo Credit: SumUp
TikTok has finally signed an agreement with three major investors including Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX to form the new TikTok US joint venture.
The deal is expected to close on January 22, according to an internal memo seen by the Associated Press. CEO Shou Zi Chew has confirmed to employees that ByteDance and TikTok have signed the binding agreements with the investor consortium. Half of this new joint venture will be owned by those investors, who each hold a 15% share. 19.9% of the new app will be held by ByteDance itself, while another 30.1% will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors.
TikTok U.S. will have a new, seven-member majority-American board of directors, according to the memo. It will also be subject to terms that “protect Americans’ data and U.S. national security.” Data for users from the United States will be stored locally in a system run by Oracle.
The much-lauded TikTok algorithm for this new venture will also be retrained on U.S. user data. The memo stated this was necessary to “ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation.” The U.S. venture will also begin overseeing its own content moderation and policies within the United States, rather than relying on ByteDance contractors.
This algorithm and how its trained has been a central issue in the security debate over whether TikTok could be used to manipulate Americans. China previously maintained the algorithm must remain under Chinese control by law, but a U.S. law signed by former President Biden said TikTok’s divestment must include divestment of the algorithm as well. This has led advertisers to be particularly nervous about the new entity, since any algorithm changes will impact their business in unforeseen ways.
On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order to keep the lights on at TikTok and prevent a shut down. Three more executive orders came throughout 2025 as Trump and his team continued to extend the deadline. From April to June and finally to September, this deadline was extended—allowing TikTok to continue operations until a deal could be struck. Now it looks like that deal will finally be in place more than a year after the app was banned due to national security concerns.
