Oracle to acquire 12.5% stake in TikTok Global

Oracle will take a 12.5 per cent stake in TikTok Global while the video-sharing app will store all its US user data on Oracle’s cloud.

Retail giant Walmart would also acquire a 7.5 per cent stake in the newly-created TikTok Global in a deal announced on Saturday.

TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has been under pressure to divest from its US operations to comply with US national security requirements. It had a deadline of September 20 after which the Trump administration had threatened to ban it from operating in the US.

Oracle said in a statement it will provide code reviews, monitoring, and auditing to provide “unprecedented” assurance that US TikTok user data is private and secure.

“Oracle will quickly deploy, rapidly scale, and operate TikTok systems in the Oracle Cloud,” said Oracle CEO Safra Catz.

“We are a hundred percent confident in our ability to deliver a highly secure environment to TikTok and ensure data privacy to TikTok’s American users, and users throughout the world. This greatly improved security and guaranteed privacy will enable the continued rapid growth of the TikTok user community to benefit all stakeholders,” Catz added.

Read: TikTok sale in key western markets imminent: reports

The TikTok deal is the latest win for the Oracle cloud business. Video conferencing service provider Zoom recently moved a large portion of its video conferencing capacity to the Oracle Public Cloud.

“In the 2020 Industry CloudPath survey that IDC recently released where it surveyed 935 Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) customers on their satisfaction with the top IaaS vendors including Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM and Google Cloud… Oracle IaaS received the highest satisfaction score,” said Oracle chief technology officer Larry Ellison.