TikTok's top executive announced toemployees that ByteDance, the social-media juggernaut's parent company, has signed deals to create a U.S. joint venture majority-owned by U.S. companies,
Bloomberg News reported late Thursday.
Agreements with Oracle (ORCL), tech-focusedinvestment firm Silver Lake and MGX, an arm of Abu Dhabi's sovereign-wealth fund, have been signed, Bloomberg said, citing an internal memo from TikTok CEO
Shou Chew that it had reviewed.
"This would secure TikTok as a keycustomer for [Oracle's cloud business], and could drive meaningful upside for non-AI part of business via durable, higher margin workloads," Mizuho
analyst Siti Panigrahi said.
In the memo, Chew told employees that theJV would operate with authority over data protection, content moderation and manage commercial activities, according to Bloomberg.
The agreements would come some two monthsafter the Trump administration ironed out a deal that they helped arrange with Oracle as the security provider of a U.S. version of TikTok.
Shares of Oracle rose more than 4% inextended trading Thursday, after ending the regular trading day up 0.9%. Even with the arrangement with Oracle, however, the plan continues to face some skepticism and has to be approved by China.
According to Bloomberg, Chew's memo doesnot mention China's view on the agreements.
At the heart of the discussions areTikTok's and ByteDance's algorithms and their knack for serving people exactly
what they seem to want, but which also have raised national-security concerns.
Several U.S. ban deadlines came and went while the negotiations were underway.