TikTok’s American joint venture has been sounding out deals for several gigawatts of computing capacity, two people familiar with the discussions told CNBC for a report published Friday. One source put the target at four gigawatts by the early 2030s.
The company didn’t confirm a number. A spokesperson told CNBC the venture “runs primarily on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in the U.S. and Oracle will continue to be our primary cloud infrastructure provider.” CNBC’s report names no contract, site or new supplier, and the outlet said it had asked Oracle for comment.
Four gigawatts sits just under the 4.5 GW of additional Stargate capacity that OpenAI and Oracle agreed to develop in July 2025. With its Abilene, Texas, site, OpenAI said, that put it past 5 GW under development, running more than 2 million chips. Gigawatts measure power, so the figure says little about how many GPUs TikTok has in mind or what it would pay.
The algorithm isn’t the only thing that needs feeding
The entity, formally TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, was set up in January to run TikTok in the U.S. Its launch announcement committed it to retrain, test and update the recommendation algorithm on U.S. user data inside Oracle’s cloud. Silver Lake, Oracle and MGX each hold 15%. ByteDance kept 19.9%.
CNBC pointed to another possible draw on capacity, a TikTok job ad for a team “shipping a flagship B2B AI product at the frontier of large-model inference and creative automation.” The listing, for a software engineer in San Jose, pitches that product to brand teams for their content production and says the group’s earlier products grew from a few design partners into global enterprise rollouts. Hands-on experience with GPU serving or other compute-intensive AI workloads counts as a plus. Base pay runs from $136,800 to $359,720.
January’s announcement framed the venture’s mandate around securing U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm. It left TikTok global’s U.S. entities in charge of “certain commercial activities, including e-commerce, advertising, and marketing.” Neither the job ad nor CNBC’s report says who would sell a creative tool to brands, or under what name.
Whoever ends up supplying the capacity, TikTok would be joining a long line. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a podcast released Friday that AWS has largely sold out 2027 and a good chunk of 2028 too.