TikTok is finally going to be America-ready

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After political side-eye, legal threats, and vaguely ominous talk about national security, TikTok has finally done the thing the US government has been asking it to do for ages: hand over a big chunk of its American business to American investors. 

According to an internal memo from Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, the deal creates a shiny new entity called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. 

Yes, that name sounds like it was generated by a corporate acronym bot, but the implications are very real. 

The memo, viewed by TechCrunch, describes this as a “new TikTok US joint venture,” which is executive-speak for “please stop asking us to sell.”

Under the agreement, a group of major American investors will take substantial control of TikTok’s US operations. 

That group includes cloud heavyweight Oracle, private equity firm Silverlake, and AI-focused investment firm MGX. 

Together, they’ll own 45 percent of TikTok’s US business. ByteDance will keep just under 20 percent, meaning TikTok is still technically in the family, just supervised very closely.

The new joint venture will oversee everything regulators worry about most: data protection, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurance. 

Oracle, in particular, is set to play hall monitor, acting as the “trusted security partner” responsible for auditing and validating compliance with US national security terms. 

The deal is expected to close on January 22, 2026, assuming everyone behaves.

The arrangement closely mirrors language from an executive order signed by Donald Trump back in September, which laid out a blueprint for TikTok’s US divorce from China. 

CNBC had previously reported that Oracle, Silverlake, and MGX were likely to be involved, but this is the first time ByteDance has confirmed the details.

The news, first reported by Axios, marks the end of a long saga in which the US government repeatedly argued TikTok posed a national security risk due to its Chinese ownership. 

For now, TikTok stays online, Americans keep scrolling, and the app finally gets the US oversight it’s been dodging, sorry, negotiating, for years.