TikTok's U.S. Business Is Quietly Shopping for Multiple Gigawatts of Computing Power
Sources tell CNBC the newly independent TikTok USDS Joint Venture is scouting infrastructure deals that could reach four gigawatts by the early 2030s, even as it maintains Oracle as its primary cloud provider.
TikTok's U.S. operation wants a lot more computing muscle, and it's starting to shop around for it now.
According to CNBC, the company officially known as TikTok USDS Joint Venture has been quietly exploring deals to lock up multiple gigawatts of compute capacity over the next several years. Two people familiar with the discussions, who spoke to CNBC anonymously because they weren't authorized to discuss the matter, said the entity is looking to secure as much as four gigawatts of power by the early 2030s. That's a notable ask for a company whose public position is that it already has a cloud partner sorted out.
To put that number in context, a gigawatt of data center capacity is roughly what's needed to power hundreds of thousands of homes. It's also the scale of commitment that, these days, is mostly associated with the handful of companies building out massive AI infrastructure — Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, OpenAI. TikTok U.S. angling for similar capacity suggests its ambitions go well past running a short-video app.
Oracle stays, but the hunt continues
TikTok's relationship with Oracle isn't going away. A company spokesperson told CNBC that TikTok "runs primarily on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in the U.S. and Oracle will continue to be our primary cloud infrastructure provider." Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, typically operates out of facilities Oracle leases rather than owns outright. CNBC reached out to Oracle for comment on the broader capacity search.
That framing matters: TikTok isn't necessarily ditching Oracle. But the scale of the capacity being discussed points to TikTok potentially supplementing — or hedging — its existing arrangement as demand for AI computing continues to outpace supply industry-wide. Companies everywhere are racing to lock in power and server capacity as AI workloads balloon, and that scramble has turned infrastructure deals into some of the most closely watched transactions in tech.
Why TikTok might need all that power
The clearest hint of what's driving this sits in TikTok's own job listings. The company has multiple machine learning roles posted, and one job ad specifically describes the company as "shipping a flagship B2B AI product at the frontier of large-model inference and creative automation," per CNBC's reporting. Large-model inference, running big AI models to generate outputs in real time, is notoriously compute-hungry, and "creative automation" suggests tools built for advertisers, marketers, or other business customers rather than the core consumer feed.
That's a meaningfully different direction than just serving up an endless scroll of videos. If TikTok U.S. is building its own AI products for business clients on top of large models, the compute demands scale quickly, and gigawatt-level planning starts to make more sense.
There's also the matter of the recommendation algorithm, the machine-learning system that decides what shows up in every user's feed and is widely considered TikTok's most valuable asset. In January, TikTok U.S. said it would retrain, test, and update that algorithm using U.S. user data, with the system "secured in Oracle's U.S. cloud environment," according to the company. Training and continually retraining a recommendation engine at TikTok's scale, now fully localized to American data, is itself a heavy and ongoing compute commitment, separate from whatever new AI products the company is building.
The backdrop: a forced divestiture
None of this is happening in a vacuum. TikTok USDS Joint Venture was created in 2026 to comply with an executive order from President Donald Trump mandating that TikTok's U.S. operations be divested from Chinese parent company ByteDance. The restructuring reshaped who actually controls the app Americans use every day.
The new entity's ownership reflects that restructuring: Silver Lake, Oracle, and MGX each hold 15% as managing investors, the Dell Family Office (Michael Dell's investment firm) is also a stakeholder, and ByteDance retained a 19.9% slice. Oracle's dual role, both as an investor in the joint venture and as its primary cloud provider, makes the infrastructure relationship unusually tight. It also raises the obvious question of how TikTok U.S. squares a search for multiple gigawatts of outside capacity with Oracle's continued status as its main cloud backbone.
CNBC's reporting doesn't specify which companies or data center operators TikTok U.S. might be in talks with beyond its existing Oracle arrangement, and it's not clear how far along those conversations are. But the fact that the search is happening at all, at a scale rivaling the biggest AI infrastructure buildouts in the industry, is a strong signal that TikTok's newly independent American business sees its future extending well beyond the algorithm that made it famous.
