# TikTok Surrenders: Oracle Wins the War Nobody Saw Coming

> ByteDance hands 45% of TikTok US to Oracle, Silverlake and MGX. Oracle goes from cloud loser to auditor of the planet's most addictive algorithm.

- Canonical: https://siliconvalleyconfidential.com/en/dossier/tiktok-surrenders-oracle-wins-the-war-nobody-saw-coming/
- Site: Silicon Valley Confidential (https://siliconvalleyconfidential.com) — weekly executive intelligence on Silicon Valley and global tech
- Author: Jose Luis Cases (https://es.linkedin.com/in/jose-luis-cases-lozano)
- Language: en
- Published: 2025-12-20 (original LinkedIn edition: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tiktok-se-rinde-oracle-gana-la-guerra-que-nadie-esperaba-cases-3q6ae/)

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### MY TAKE

This week left me speechless. And that's saying something after months of madness in tech.

The TikTok deal is historic, and I'm not exaggerating. For years we've heard "TikTok is going to be banned," "China will never give in," "it's a political bluff"... and suddenly, on Wednesday, ByteDance signs off on Oracle, Silverlake, and an Abu Dhabi fund taking 45% of the American business. ByteDance goes from controlling everything to keeping 20%. It closes on January 22. Period.

What the hell happened? Trump's pressure worked. It's that simple. And Oracle, which looked like the loser of the cloud war, just became the "trusted security partner" that will audit the most addictive algorithm on the planet. Larry Ellison must be popping a Bollinger R.D. 1988.

But what worries me most this week isn't TikTok. It's what's happening in the AI war.

OpenAI is in real panic. This isn't me exaggerating: Fortune published on Wednesday that Altman has the whole team even deeper in "code red" because Google is eating their lunch. The numbers are worrying: OpenAI fell to 27% of enterprise market share while Anthropic climbs to 40%. ChatGPT has lost 200 million visits in a month. And Google launched Gemini 3 Flash the same day, as if to say "we're right here, bastards."

OpenAI's response is revealing: they've paused ALL investments in advertising, e-commerce, health, shopping, agentic systems... EVERYTHING. They're focusing only on the ChatGPT core.

That's not strategy, that's survival.

And meanwhile, what is Amazon doing? Negotiating to put 10 billion into OpenAI. Let me get this straight: Microsoft already owns 49%, Amazon wants in... is OpenAI going to end up owned by two clouds that compete with each other? This is going to end badly.

Yann LeCun is leaving Meta to build his own AI company with a valuation of 3 billion euros... before having a product. The guy who founded FAIR, who has been Meta's academic conscience on AI for a decade, is leaving because Zuckerberg has decided that "open source" AI is no longer cool and they want to close everything up to monetize. LeCun is not just anybody. This is a declaration of ideological war over the future of AI.

And the question I ask myself every week still has no answer: where are the damn customers?

Databricks just raised 4 billion at a 134 billion valuation. Unconventional AI raised 475 million in seed before having a product. Lovable, 330 million.

And meanwhile, McKinsey is laying off 10% of its workforce because companies aren't spending on consulting. How does that add up? It doesn't.

The music keeps playing. But there are fewer and fewer chairs.

THE BOMBSHELL OF THE WEEK
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On December 18, TikTok signed its surrender.

Oracle, Silverlake, and MGX (Abu Dhabi) take 45% of the American operations. ByteDance drops from 100% to 20%. A new entity is created, "TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC," with Oracle as the "trusted security partner" auditing the algorithm, data, and content moderation.

Closing is January 22, 2026.

What almost nobody is saying: this is exactly what Trump demanded in his September executive order. The administration won. ByteDance caved. And Oracle, which had spent years losing the cloud war to AWS and Azure, just got the keys to the most influential social network among people under 30.

The detail that catches my attention: Abu Dhabi comes in as an investor. The Gulf keeps buying American tech at bargain prices while Washington looks the other way.

POWER MOVES
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Mozilla named a new CEO on Tuesday and the community is on fire. Anthony Enzor-DeMeo (ex-CPO of Firefox) replaces Laura Chambers after two years of interim leadership. His first statement: Firefox will be a "modern AI browser" within three years, but with a mandatory kill switch.

The problem: the Firefox community exists precisely because it wants to AVOID the AI of Chrome and Edge. This is like Patagonia announcing it's getting into fast fashion. The backlash has already started on Reddit and Hacker News.

What's behind it: Mozilla depends on Google for 80%+ of its revenue (the default search deal). They diversify or they die. The AI browser is their desperate bet.

Apple announced the same day that Jennifer Newstead is leaving Meta to become its new General Counsel, starting in March. She replaces Kate Adams, who had been there since 2017.

The pattern that worries me: Apple lost Alan Dye (design) to Meta, and now hires Newstead from Meta. Who's winning this talent war? It's not clear, but the two-way flow between the two companies is bizarre.

And the most important move of the week: Yann LeCun confirms he's leaving Meta at the end of the year to found AMI Labs in Paris. They're raising 500 million euros at a 3 billion valuation... with no product.

His pitch: "world models," an AI that understands physics, has persistent memory, and can do complex planning. Not just predict the next word.

The real reason for his exit: Meta cut 600 people from Superintelligence Labs in October. FAIR, the lab LeCun founded, has been getting trimmed for years. And now Alexandr Wang (Scale AI) is the new Chief AI Officer, with a much more commercial and closed agenda.

LeCun is leaving because Meta no longer believes in the AI he wants to build.

MONEY TALKS
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This week's deals are insane:

Databricks closed its Series L: 4 billion at a 134 billion valuation. That's 34% more than three months ago. Its revenue run-rate is 4.8 billion growing at 55% annually. Its AI products alone already bill more than 1 billion. And they're hiring 600 fresh graduates for 2026.

This is the closest thing to an IPO without doing an IPO. They've spent years selling secondaries to employees while waiting for the perfect moment to go public.

Lovable raised 330 million at 6.6 billion. It's a Swedish "vibe-coding" startup (yes, that's what they call it) that lets you build software with natural language. CapitalG (Alphabet) and Menlo Ventures lead.

The joke: an Alphabet company investing in a tool that could make the engineers working at Google obsolete. Corporate cannibalism is no longer even disguised.

Cyera: 400 million at 9 billion. Israeli cybersecurity. Blackstone leads. Their product: a unified view of all your data in the cloud.

Radiant Nuclear: 300 million at 1.8 billion. They make portable 1-megawatt nuclear microreactors you can carry on a truck. The pitch: energy for AI data centers anywhere.

This is what I said last week: the next fat unicorn is going to be an energy company, not a model company. The VCs already know it.

Adaptive Security: 81 million in Series B. Deepfake attack simulations to train companies. Nvidia, OpenAI Startup Fund, and a16z as investors. The company was founded THIS YEAR.

### PRODUCT SECRETS

OpenAI is in total "code red" against Google.

The real numbers Fortune published on Wednesday:

*   Enterprise market share: OpenAI 27% (falling), Anthropic 40% (rising), Google 21% (stable)
*   ChatGPT dropped from 6 billion to 5.8 billion monthly visits in November
*   Gemini climbed from 450 to 650 million monthly users since July

OpenAI's response: they launched GPT-5.2 in mid-December to reclaim the benchmarks. They've paused ALL investment in vertical plays (ads, commerce, health). Core ChatGPT only.

The big rumor: Amazon is negotiating a 10 billion investment in OpenAI. If it closes, the valuation would jump from 150 billion to more than 500 billion. And OpenAI would use Amazon's Trainium chips instead of Nvidia.

Google launched Gemini 3 Flash on Wednesday, the same day as the Fortune article. Perfect timing.

The benchmarks are brutal: MMMU-Pro (multimodality) at 81.2%, the best in the industry. It's 3x faster and uses 30% fewer tokens than Gemini 2.5 Pro. Price: 0.50 dollars per million input tokens.

JetBrains, Figma, Cursor, and Harvey have already adopted it via Vertex AI.

And the most interesting thing of the week: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Block, and AWS just co-founded the "Agentic AI Foundation" under the Linux Foundation. They're going to create open standards for AI agents.

The three base protocols: MCP (Anthropic) to connect agents to apps, agentsMD (OpenAI) for instructions to coding agents, and Goose (Block) as a local open source agent.

Competitors creating standards together. That only happens when everyone is afraid someone else will take the whole market.

### REAL NUMBERS

This week's layoffs:

McKinsey announced on Monday that it will lay off 10% of its global workforce. That's around 5,000 employees over 18-24 months. The reason: companies aren't spending on consulting and AI is automating much of the junior work.

When McKinsey lays people off, it means the white-collar jobs cycle has turned negative. They're the canary in the coal mine.

The Trade Desk laid off less than 1% (around 35-40 people) on Tuesday. All-hands at 12:30 ET, right before the holidays. The cruelest timing possible.

Amazon confirmed on Thursday that it's laying off 84 employees in Seattle and Bellevue by February. Software dev, recruiting, HR, engineering. It's separate from the 14,000 corporate layoffs in October.

The secondary market tells another story:

In Q3 2025, the median company trades at a 29% discount to its last funding round. 57% of companies trade below their last valuation.

Winners: PsiQuantum (+70%), OpenAI, Scale.ai, Vercel (+30%+) Losers: Arctic Wolf, Postman (both -30%)

The market already knows which companies will survive and which won't.

### VALLEY DRAMA

The H-1B visa crisis exploded this week on Blind.

Hundreds of posts from tech workers with canceled visa stampings, months-long delays, and employers telling them "do not leave the US under any circumstances." Appointments aren't available until October 2026 at many consulates.

What nobody says out loud: some companies are using this as an excuse for "remote work from India" at salaries 60-70% lower. Layoffs without calling them layoffs.

The Meta rumor that is NOT true (but almost):

It circulated on Blind that Meta is going to lay off 25% of Instagram. NOT confirmed. What IS confirmed: Meta announced a general 5% cut in October. But the fact that the Instagram-specific rumor has traction says something about the internal mood.

The weirdest real estate data point of the week:

Buck Quarter Ranch, 900 acres in northeast Washington, sold to a "Silicon Valley tech billionaire." The realtor says buyers are looking for "properties with serious defensibility, independent water resources, and robust off-grid capabilities."

Tech bros prepping for the apocalypse. They're not even hiding it anymore.

Thanks for reading me, and merry Christmas to all.

Onward