President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to pave the way for a group of investors to operate the United States version of TikTok. The version will be detached by byte from its parent company so that TikTok can continue to operate in the United States.
The United States Government has been trying for months to find non-Chinese investors for a United States company, TikTok, which, according to Vice-President JD Vance, will be valued at $14 billion.
In January this year, the United States Government banned TikTok on national security grounds. Trump has since repeatedly postponed the enforcement of the ban. The order issued on Thursday extended the deadline for negotiations until mid-January next year to finalize the deal.
“This transaction does mean that Americans can continue to use TikTok and are more secure than they used in the past, and their data will be safe.” Vance indicates.
Trump stated on Thursday that the United States version of TikTok was funded by “American investors, American companies, very good companies and excellent investors”.
However, according to two sources, an Emirates investment company is expected to join the consortium that invested in the new United States company TikTok.
They also revealed that the UAE company, known as MGX, would be involved in investments with United States companies, including the Oracle technology giant and the silver lake capital of the investment company. Trump indicated on Thursday that the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and the chief executive officer of the company Michael Dale were also involved as investors.
This investment by MGX is the latest example of the United Arab Emirates’ use of considerable financial resources to support Trump. In recent months, the representative of the Gulf State had pledged to invest $1.4 trillion in the United States economy over the next 10 years, and MGX had indicated that $2 billion had been invested in an encrypted money start-up by the Tromp family.
The United Arab Emirates is also promoting the sale of valuable artificial intelligence chips in the United States while the TikTok investment negotiations and the MGX encrypted currency investment are under way. The United Arab Emirates had been pressuring the Trump Government to change United States policy in order to build data centres and become a powerful artificial intelligence power.
During a visit to Abu Dhabi in May this year, the Government agreed to sell 500,000 artificial intelligence chips to the United Arab Emirates for a project that will be included in the largest data centre campus worldwide.
MGX has negotiated the TikTok investment for several months and is one of the many companies involved in the transaction that are expected to benefit from the Emirates data centre project. Oracle, a cloud computing service provider and TikTok investor, will build a data centre in the United Arab Emirates at a cost of approximately $20 billion. Silver Lake Capital is also one of TikTok’s investors, one of its partners in the project – – The United Arab Emirates artificial intelligence company G42 holds shares.
Although there is currently no evidence that the chip deal is in return for other transactions, two Democratic Senators have requested the Inspector General of the Ministry of Commerce and the State Department to conduct an investigation to determine whether government officials in Trump have violated ethical norms in billions of dollars in transactions related to the United Arab Emirates.
