TikTok announced on Thursday that it is being acquired by a group of bidders led by Oracle Corp., initiating its long-delayed effort to split from its Chinese parent company ByteDance Ltd. According to an internal document obtained by Bloomberg, TikTok CEO Shou Chew informed staff members that the business and ByteDance had inked legally binding agreements to establish a US joint venture that would be primarily controlled by American investors.
Agreements with Oracle, Silver Lake Management, and MGX have been signed, according to Chew, who added that he was "pleased to share some great news." Although Chew stated that "there's more work to be done" before then, the deal is anticipated to close on January 22, 2026.
Regulators in China have not yet stated if they will authorize the deal. Chew informed staff members in the memo that after the US joint venture closes, it would function as a separate organization with authority over algorithm security, content moderation, and data protection in the nation.
Additionally, he stated that a "new seven-member majority-American board of directors" will oversee the new US organization. In Thursday's after-hours trade, Oracle shares increased by almost 6%.
The agreement, which was valued at about $14 billion for TikTok's US businesses and was pending permission from China at the time, was similar to what the White House announced in September, according to the document.
China's views on the deal, which would give ByteDance some but not complete ownership over TikTok US, were not included in Chew's memo on Thursday.
According to the agreement, 50% of the investors in TikTok US will be new, with Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX, an investment firm located in Abu Dhabi, each acquiring 15% ownership; affiliates of some of ByteDance's current investors will have 30.1%; and ByteDance will keep 19.9%.
The conditions listed in the CEO's memo seem to allow ByteDance to perhaps keep control over important aspects of the US TikTok app, which is utilized by half of the nation.
The Chinese parent company would keep around half of the profits from TikTok's US operations, according to a prior report from Bloomberg News.
Because of ByteDance's role, which has long been a source of contention in discussions, some critics including members of Trump's own political party have claimed that the agreement reached by the White House might not be enforceable.
TikTok US and ByteDance were prohibited from operating together by a national security measure signed by former President Joe Biden.
ByteDance's highly sought-after content algorithms are said to be essential to TikTok's operations. According to the White House's recent version of the agreement, ByteDance will license its AI recommendation technology to the recently established US TikTok business, which will use the current algorithm to retrain a new system on US data safeguarded by Oracle, TikTok's cloud partner.
Concerns have also been made about Oracle's function as a data security guard. The agreement is similar to a previous TikTok-Oracle partnership that was suggested to the US government years ago as a means of resolving comparable issues over TikTok's Chinese ownership.
In the end, the US government rejected such collaboration, known as Project Texas, since it was thought to be inadequate to handle matters of national security.
If the agreement is reached, it will resolve a long-standing problem in Beijing-Washington relations and indicate advancement in more extensive talks between the two nations, who have sparred on trade and other matters.
Disclosures regarding the proposed arrangement, which was required on national security grounds by a bill enacted by the Joe Biden administration last year, had been dominated by the White House.
Because TikTok is owned by a Chinese corporation, US officials are concerned that Beijing would use the app to gather information about US residents or use the recommendation system to push particular storylines to Americans.
The sell-or-ban rule's original legal deadline was this past January, but Trump has repeatedly extended it since taking office, most recently extending it until January 2026.
TikTok has been conducting business as usual and further establishing itself as a major cultural force in the US for months as the likelihood of a ban under Trump has decreased. It has been actively pursuing livestream shopping and e-commerce, collaborating with significant US IT firms like Amazon.com Inc.
The TikTok Awards, the company's first-ever Oscars-style red carpet event, took place in Los Angeles on the same day Chew revealed an agreement had been struck.
