Amazon reportedly wants to purchase the U.S. business of TikTok.
As the deadline for TikTok to divest its U.S. operations looms, a major suitor has reportedly emerged.
Amazon has placed a bid to purchase the U.S. business of TikTok from its China-based parent company ByteDance, according to Reuters. Although Amazon, TikTok and ByteDance have all declined public comment so far, Reuters said a Trump administration official confirmed that Amazon sent a letter to Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick requesting to make an offer to purchase TikTok’s U.S. operation.
No financial figure has been publicly released. Other interested bidders are said to include Oracle, which has been storing TikTok’s U.S. data on its servers since 2022, as well as an investor group led by the founder of adult entertainment platform OnlyFans, a group of non-Chinese ByteDance shareholders, and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
The Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act was passed in April 2024 in response to longstanding concerns over possible ties between TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance and the Chinese Communist Party and possible risks to U.S. user privacy (ByteDance and TikTok have publicly denied the validity of these concerns).
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Due to this legislation, which makes it unlawful for U.S. companies to distribute, maintain, or update TikTok unless U. S. operation of the Chinese-owned platform is severed from Chinese control, TikTok briefly went dark in the U.S. during the weekend of Jan. 18-19.