Amazon apparently also wants to buy Tiktok

The deadline set by Donald Trump for a solution to the future of Tiktok in the USA is approaching. Another contender with deep pockets is said to have emerged on the home straight.

According to a media report, Amazon has expressed its interest in buying Tiktok. The world’s largest online retailer made the offer in a letter to Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, wrote the New York Times, citing informed sources. However, various parties involved in the negotiations did not take the Amazon offer seriously, it said.

According to a US law, Tiktok should actually have been sold by the China-based owner Bytedance by January 19 – or go off the grid in the US. However, President Donald Trump granted a grace period of 75 days, which expires on April 5. However, he has also repeatedly held out the prospect of extending the deadline if necessary – although there is no basis for this in the law.

Bytedance and Tiktok have previously said that it would be impossible to sell just the US part of the short video app because this would break up the platform. Trump said there were “different ways to buy Tiktok” – and they would find the one that was best for the US. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had taken a friendlier line towards Trump in recent months.

With its cloud subsidiary AWS, Amazon would definitely have the necessary infrastructure to operate a platform on the scale of Tiktok. The group is also big in the video streaming business. Another interested party for Tiktok is the software company Oracle, which Bytedance had already commissioned to secure the data of US users.

dpa