TikTok Eyes Partial Sale and Double Down on AI

The high-stakes drama involved The future of TikTok in the United States and the financial strategies of its parent company in China, ByteDancealternate as investors consider possible options.

An American ban on social media apps, based on concerns about data privacy, content moderation and national security, delayed by an executive order. As the countdown to that delay continues, General Atlantic CEO Bill Fordwhose company holds a stake in ByteDance, said Bloomberg Television on Thursday (Jan. 23) that a partial sale of TikTok’s US operations meeting government security demands is possible. A partial sale would still allow ByteDance to retain some control over its core assets.

“We are optimistic that we will find a solution,” said Ford, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The exact structure of such a deal remains unclearbut this be involved Although sell a significant stake to American investors or create a new entity to manage TikTok’s operations in the US. PYMNTS reported that bidders have started showing interest to get TikTok. A company that just stated interest in merging with TikTok is the search engine startup Perplexity AI.

It also appears that ByteDance’s contingency strategy, if a deal doesn’t close in time, is to double down on AI.

Anonymous sources told Reuters that ByteDance has allocated more than 150 billion yuan ($20.64 billion) in capital expenditures — mostly related to artificial intelligence (AI) – for this year. Compare that to a recent Financial Times report that said ByteDance is allocating $12 billion for AI infrastructure.

the The company has over 15 standalone AI applicationsaccording to a Reuters reportincluding the chatbot Doubao, which has 75 million monthly users, the text-to-video generator Jimeng, and the image generator Xinghu.

The sources said that about half of the $20 billion capital expenditure investment is planned for overseas AI infrastructure, including data centers and networking equipment, and the major chipmakers. HuaweiCambricon, and US supplier Nvidia is expected to be the main beneficiary of this expenditure.

Reuters noted that ByteDance is the largest buyer of Nvidia’s H20 AI chips, which the chipmaker has tailored for China in response to trade restrictions.

When contacted by Reuters for comment, ByteDance responded that the information provided was “incorrect.”