MW Oracle investors are eager for a TikTok deal. A fresh delay calls that into question.

By Christine Ji

The White House just gave Oracle and ByteDance more time to finalize an agreement that would see a U.S. investor group take control of the popular app and its data

Oracle is viewed as the most likely U.S. buyer for TikTok.

As Oracle Corp. and TikTok's parent ByteDance work toward a pivotal deal to save the app, the White House extended the deadline for a potential U.S. ban to Dec. 16.

On Tuesday afternoon, Trump issued an executive order overriding the previous deadline, which was set to expire on Wednesday. This marks the fourth extension in 2025.

Oracle $(ORCL)$ investors are hopeful for an agreement. After rising over 3% on Monday, shares of Oracle popped 4% upon Tuesday's market open but closed the session up just 1.5%.

The executive order comes after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Monday that Washington and Beijing had reached a "framework" deal for TikTok that could see the social-media platform be acquired by a U.S. buyer.

President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to speak this Friday to finalize the details, Bessent told CNBC on Tuesday morning. The extension would prevent a shutdown of TikTok in the interim.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal would create a new U.S. entity to oversee TikTok, with an investor group including Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz holding roughly 80% ownership. Chinese shareholders' ownership would fall below 20% to comply with U.S. national-security requirements. Existing U.S. users would be asked to migrate to a new app that TikTok has built.

Shares of Oracle have surged nearly 27% since the company's earnings call last week, largely due to its securing several multibillion-dollar artificial-intelligence deals. Meanwhile, TikTok remains a key source of diversified revenue, as the social-media giant runs its entire U.S. operation on Oracle's cloud infrastructure under the restructuring plan known as Project Texas.

If confirmed, the deal is expected to provide a boost to Oracle's business. Under the agreement, TikTok engineers will use technology licensed from ByteDance to create new content-recommendation algorithms, and the user data would be handled and stored in Oracle's cloud servers in Texas.

In June, Mizuho analyst Siti Panigrahi said that a TikTok divestiture could be a positive for Oracle, as TikTok "will likely remain a major non-AI [Oracle Cloud Infrastructure] customer" as long as rival cloud providers like Amazon.com Inc.'s (AMZN) AWS or Microsoft Corp.'s $(MSFT)$ Azure are not involved in the buyer group.

On Monday, D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria characterized a potential TikTok-Oracle deal as "favorable" for the stock. Much of Oracle's current backlog comes from its $300 billion deal with OpenAI, which Luria believes poses concentration risk for the company.

Representatives from Oracle and ByteDance did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Read on: Trump has a framework for a TikTok deal with China, but analysts warn the devil is in the details

-Christine Ji

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September 16, 2025 16:08 ET (20:08 GMT)

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