President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that would help clear the way for a coalition of investors to run an American version of TikTok, one that is separate from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, so that it can keep operating in the United States.
The administration has been working for months to find non-Chinese investors for a U.S. TikTok company, which Vice President JD Vance said would be valued at $14 billion.
The deal is aimed at helping TikTok comply with a federal law, which banned the app in the United States in January out of concern that Beijing could use it to gain access to Americans’ sensitive data or to spread propaganda. Mr. Trump has delayed enforcement of the ban repeatedly. The Thursday order gives negotiators until mid-January to finalize the deal.
“This deal really does mean that Americans can use TikTok, but actually use it with more confidence than they had in the past,” Mr. Vance said. “Their data is going to be secure and it’s not going to be used as a propaganda weapon against our fellow citizens.”
Mr. Trump said Thursday that the U.S. TikTok investors were “American investors, American companies, great ones, great investors.”
But an Emirati investment firm is expected to join the coalition of companies that will invest in the new American TikTok company, according to two people familiar with the talks.
The Emirati firm, MGX, would join companies based in the United States, like the tech giant Oracle and the investment firm Silver Lake, the people said. Mr. Trump said Thursday that the media mogul Rupert Murdoch and the technology CEO Michael Dell were also involved as investors.
MGX did not immediately return a request for comment. Fox Corporation and Dell Technologies declined to comment.
The MGX investment is the latest example of the Emiratis using their deep pockets to help Mr. Trump. In recent months, representatives of the Gulf State have pledged to invest $1.4 trillion in the U.S. economy over the next decade, and MGX has said it has deposited $2 billion in a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Trump family.
The TikTok talks and the MGX crypto investment played out as the Emiratis were pursuing a sale of valuable artificial intelligence chips. The Emiratis’ ability to buy the chips had been limited by the Biden administration over concerns about the Gulf State’s ties to China. But the Emiratis had been pressing the Trump administration to change U.S. policy, so they could build data centers and become an A.I. powerhouse.
During Mr. Trump’s trip to Abu Dhabi in May, the administration agreed to sell the Emiratis 500,000 A.I. chips for a data center campus that would be among the largest in the world.
MGX, which has been discussing the TikTok investment for months, was one of several companies in the TikTok deal that stood to benefit from the Emirates’ data center project. Oracle, the cloud computing provider and TikTok investor, will be building a data center that will cost about $20 billion in the Emirates. Silver Lake, an investment company and TikTok investor, has a stake in one of the partners in that project, G42, an Emirati A.I. company.
While there is no evidence that the chip deal was offered in return for any other transactions, two Democratic senators have asked inspectors general at the Commerce and State Departments to investigate whether Trump administration officials violated ethic rules in the multibillion-dollar deals involving the Emiratis.
Mr. Trump has said that China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, had signed off on the framework for a deal. A readout of the call from a Chinese state-run news agency was more vague, but Mr. Xi appeared to support a commercial solution to TikTok.
Kailyn Rhone contributed reporting.
Lauren Hirsch is a Times reporter who covers deals and dealmakers in Wall Street and Washington.
Tripp Mickle reports on some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Nvidia, Google and Apple. He also writes about trends across the tech industry like layoffs and artificial intelligence.
Emmett Lindner is a business reporter for The Times.
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