TikTok is Being Gutted for AI Data and Advertisers

TikTok is no longer the company it once was. From a creator centric social hub it turned into a data collecting and selling operation. New owners are making money on frankly brokering off data.

On January 22, 2026, TikTok’s U.S. operations officially moved under the control of TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. This new entity is majority owned (80.1%) by an American consortium:

• Oracle, Silver Lake, and the UAE-based MGX each hold 15% stakes.
• Oracle’s Larry Ellison now controls the cloud environment housing all U.S. data.
• ByteDance has been reduced to a 19.9% passive stake, the legal maximum allowed under current law.

For content creators who actually make the content, this was a betrayal. RPM has plummeted. Videos that used to generate hundreds of dollars now earn pennies with millions of views. Since the takeover, the "For You" feed is under aggressive AI moderation that suppresses political speech, original content and just random dumb bans (obvious that it is done not by human moderators). Professional creators are fleeing to YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. YouTube is the primary winner here, offering a transparent 45%–55% ad revenue split that TikTok’s new management has shown no interest in matching. (what a nice way of creating choice between bad and worse).

Why would investors spend billions on an app only to let its stars leave?

• Creators will be forced to go back to youtube instagram Fb due to lack of better platforms
• To collect an immense amount of data to feed the statistical program - so called AI companies (OpenAI, Google etc.)

TikTok data

TikTok provides billions of hours of human facial expressions, speech patterns, and physical movements. This is essential for AI that needs to "see" and "hear" the world. Oracle now owns the world’s most precise map of human desire. This data allows AI models to predict consumer trends and cultural shifts before they happen. New privacy policies implemented after takeover allow for the collection of geolocation, financial details, and even keystroke patterns, raw material for highly invasive, predictive AI models.

Winners and Losers

Meta and Google are absorbing TikTok’s advertising vacuum. Oracle and Silver Lake stand to make billions by licensing the video archive to AI developers.

The Creators who lost their livelihoods, and users, who are no longer the "customers" of a social network, but the "raw material" for a data wholesale business.

These Companies Might Be a Good Bet For You

Oracle is behind the scenes winner. By hosting TikTok’s U.S. data on its cloud systems, Oracle makes money from the platform’s operations no matter how popular the app is. Oracle could benefit long term from the growing demand for data used to train artificial intelligence systems. Because of that, many think the company still has room to grow, and they see stock price dips as buying opportunities.

Meta and Google are the main companies gaining from TikTok’s struggles for creators. As TikTok creators complain about falling earnings, many are putting more focus on Instagram Reels instead. Advertisers tend to follow creators and audience attention, so ad money will shift in the same direction. Meta has already reported strong ad revenue growth, and some analysts believe the company is well positioned to keep benefiting if TikTok remains unstable.