With the September 15 deadline looming, the bidding war for TikTok is heating up especially now that Walmart has joined forces with Microsoft.
Microsoft is just one of the many companies considering acquiring the social media app TikTok from its parent company ByteDance following President Trump’s executive order that the service needs to be sold to a US company to continue operating in the United States. However, things didn’t start out this way when the software giant first began talks with TikTok this summer. Originally Microsoft had discussed taking a small stake in the company and becoming one of the app’s minority investors, according to a new report from Moneycontrol. At the time, it was believed that even a smaller deal could be a win for both companies. For Microsoft, a minority investment in TikTok could lead to the company deciding to use Azure over competing cloud computing services. According to The Information, the social media app signed a three-year deal with Google Cloud worth at least $800m for its cloud services in May of last year.
