A Silent Oracle’s TikTok Edge

It’s hard to walk down the street lately without tripping over someone who has expressed interest in buying TikTok. I’m kidding, but you get the point—everyone from AI startup Perplexity to billionaire Frank McCourt to the YouTube influencer MrBeast claims to be interested. As is often the case, however, it’s the people who aren’t talking that we should take seriously—and that is most obviously Oracle, which as we reported today, is a leading contender in the discussions now underway.

Oracle, which as our story said is the candidate favored by management of TikTok’s parent ByteDance, is a key cloud provider for TikTok in the U.S. The three big cloud firms—Google, Microsoft and Amazon—also work with TikTok or ByteDance. It’s possible one or more of these firms are also lurking in the background of the current bidding. As much as some bidders are drawn to TikTok by its audience and ad revenue, TikTok may be even more important to other bidders because it is a big user of cloud services. Capturing more of that spending might warrant one of these big cloud firms making a bid for TikTok.