TikTok has officially closed a landmark deal to separate its US operations from its global parent company, ByteDance, ensuring the app’s continued presence in the United States and ending a years-long standoff with Washington over national security concerns.
Okay News reports that the agreement, announced on Thursday, January 22, 2026, establishes a new independent entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, which will be majority-owned by American investors. This restructuring is designed to comply with US laws that threatened to ban the platform if it remained under Chinese control.
Under the terms of the deal, the new joint venture will be governed by a seven-member board of directors, the majority of whom are American. The ownership structure includes three managing investors, each holding a 15% stake: Oracle, the cloud computing giant; Silver Lake, a US private equity firm; and MGX, an Abu Dhabi-based investment company focused on AI and technology.
ByteDance will retain a 19.9% minority stake in the new entity. The remaining 35.1% is held by a consortium of investors, including the family office of Michael Dell and Vastmere Strategic Investments, an affiliate of Susquehanna International Group.
A central component of the agreement involves the app’s powerful content recommendation algorithm—often cited as its “secret sauce.” The formula has been licensed to the new US entity and will be retrained exclusively using US user data. This data, along with the algorithm itself, will be secured within Oracle’s US cloud environment to address fears of foreign access.
Adam Presser, formerly of WarnerMedia, has been appointed Chief Executive of the new joint venture. The board will also include TikTok’s global CEO, Shou Zi Chew, alongside executives from the managing investor firms.
The deal’s closure follows months of delays and political maneuvering. While legislation signed by President Joe Biden in 2024 set a deadline for divestment, enforcement was postponed repeatedly by President Donald Trump, who reversed his earlier stance on banning the app.
Following the announcement, President Trump took to social media to claim credit for the resolution, writing, “I am so happy to have helped in saving TikTok.”
Experts suggest that while the deal secures the app’s future for its 200 million American users, the required changes to the algorithm could result in a user experience that differs from the global version of the platform.
