In the United States, the TikTok soap opera reaches a turning point: ByteDance has signed a binding agreement to transfer the platform's U.S. operations to a new joint venture majority-owned by American investors, with Oracle in the role of technology guarantor. The deal, valued at approximately $14 billion, aims to avoid a ban of the app, which has been at the center of a years-long tug-of-war between Washington and Beijing over data, algorithms, and national security.
A Deal to Avoid a Permanent Blackout
As reported by Italian outlets like HDblog and Tom's Hardware, the agreement comes after the 2024 law that required apps considered controlled by hostile foreign powers to sell their U.S. operations to non-adversarial entities, under penalty of a total block in the USA. TikTok already experienced a temporary shutdown in early 2025, before coming back online thanks to extensions and appeals.
To definitively settle the dispute, the path of corporate separation was chosen. Thus, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is born, a new entity based in the United States that will be tasked with managing the American version of the app. The closing of the deal is scheduled for January 22, 2026, barring unforeseen issues with regulatory approvals.
Who Owns What in the New U.S. TikTok
According to reconstructions by international agencies like Reuters, the joint venture will be controlled by a consortium of investors led by Oracle, Silver Lake, and the Emirati fund MGX. Each of the three main investors will hold about 15% of the new company, while the remaining shares will stay with funds already present in ByteDance's capital and new institutional partners.
ByteDance will fall below the symbolic threshold of 20%, retaining around 19.9% of TikTok USA. The board of directors will have a U.S. majority, and the new structure must operate as an independent entity regarding data protection, algorithm security, content moderation, and software audits.
Data, Algorithm, and Oracle's Role
The most delicate part of the agreement concerns the recommendation algorithm, the true heart of TikTok's success. As explained by newspapers like Domani and Geopop, the recommendation technology will be licensed to the new joint venture, which must train a separate system based exclusively on U.S. user data, separate from the data centers and global flows controlled by ByteDance.
Oracle will become the "trusted" security partner: its data centers will host U.S. user data, and its systems must verify that the algorithm operates in compliance with the guardrails set by national security agreements. In effect, the California-based multinational becomes the custodian of the cloud infrastructure and the technical controller of the internal processes of the new U.S. TikTok.
Despite the American majority in governance, many analysts point out that questions remain about ByteDance's residual influence and, more broadly, about the margin of influence Beijing could still exert on the platform's future, starting with the intellectual property of the original algorithm.
What Changes for Users and the Rest of the World
In the short term, for U.S. users, little will change in the daily experience: same icon, same interface, same endless feed of videos. The differences will be behind the scenes, as the new algorithm trained solely on U.S. data begins to diverge from the engine used in the rest of the world and is subjected to stricter controls.
For those using TikTok in Europe and Italy, the deal has no immediate effects, but it represents an important precedent. If the United States succeeds in imposing the localization of data and algorithms under national control, it is plausible that other regulators will study this architecture to replicate it, in a context where privacy, digital sovereignty, and control of large platforms are increasingly sensitive issues.
For now, TikTok has avoided a ban in the USA at the cost of becoming a two-speed platform: on one side, an American TikTok "commissioned" by a stars-and-stripes joint venture; on the other, a global TikTok still rooted in ByteDance's Chinese ecosystem. Time, and perhaps the next political cycle in Washington, will tell if this compromise will hold.
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