Oracle Corp. said it will take a 12.5% stake in TikTok Global and become the cloud computing provider to the newly formed company, culminating weeks of negotiations over a popular video-sharing app that became the focus of U.S.-China tension.
Oracle is working with Walmart Inc. and other investors including Sequoia Capital, which together will end up with a 20% stake in TikTok Global, people familiar with the matter said. TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. will hold the rest.
TikTok’s decision to pick Oracle was influenced by another company, Zoom Video Communications Inc., which recently moved some of its video conferencing capacity to Oracle’s cloud business, Redwood City, California-based Oracle said Saturday in a statement.
ByteDance searched for investors in TikTok’s U.S. operations after Trump proclaimed that TikTok was a threat to U.S. national security, and ordered the app to be sold to an American business or shut down by Sept. 20. The president said earlier Saturday that he gave his “blessing” to the “concept” of the deal, even though ByteDance will retain such a large stake.
“TikTok picked Oracle’s new Generation 2 Cloud infrastructure because it’s much faster, more reliable, and more secure than the first generation technology currently offered by all the other major cloud providers,” Executive Chairman Larry Ellison said in a statement.