TikTok US joint venture seen resembling Apple’s China iCloud deal

TikTok has launched a US joint venture, TikTok USDS, to manage the American content ecosystem, while commercial activities stay with existing US entities. The deal, approved by the Chinese government, is structured similarly to Apple's 2018 transfer of Chinese iCloud data to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data. ByteDance retains algorithms and intellectual property rights, holding a 19.9% stake in the joint venture, with Oracle, Silver Lake, MGX, and ByteDance investors holding the remaining shares. The joint venture will retrain the content recommendation algorithm using US user data, licensed from ByteDance, and provide safeguards for ByteDance's other US apps. This arrangement addresses previous concerns that led to Beijing's opposition to a direct divestiture, requiring approval for exporting technologies like TikTok's algorithm.