TikTok’s US sale looks to be a done deal after missing several deadlines in 2025

Following years of controversy, promises, and potential (and even short-lived) bans, TikTok’s long-awaited US deal is happening next month.

As reported by CNBC (via The Verge), the company’s US operations are being spun out into a new organization. TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC includes investments from Oracle — unsurprisingly, considering how long Larry Ellison’s name has floated around this deal — Silver Lake and MGX, an AI-focused investment firm centered in Abu Dhabi. 50% of this venture will be owned by these investors, while 30.1% go to ByteDance’s existing investors, and the remaining 19.9% is kept by ByteDance itself.

In a letter shared by CEO Shou Zi Chew to his staff, he confirmed that this new US-based organization will oversee its own algorithm, including “retraining” its recommendation algorithm “on U.S user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation.” It’s unclear how this could affect what users see in their feeds on a daily basis. TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is also responsible for platform moderation and “software assurance.”

It’s taken a long road to get here. TikTok was initially shut down in the US in January, bouncing between administrations during the run-up to Inauguration Day. Since then, the app has seen several extensions to make a deal, the last one having been set in September following a framework deal for this US spin-off. Although that extension expired earlier this week, with a sale in place, TikTok’s fate in the US appears to be settled for the time being. The deal is set to close on January 22nd, 2026, barring any additional hiccups.