TikTok spent years fighting to preserve its U.S. business as lawmakers threatened to effectively ban the social media platform over national-security concerns.
Earlier this year, that fight resulted in a sweeping restructuring of TikTok’s American operations under a new majority-American-owned joint venture.
Now, just months later, that U.S. business is closing one of its major offices and eliminating hundreds of jobs.
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is permanently closing its Nashville, Tennessee, location, affecting 250 workers, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) filing reviewed by TheStreet.
The closure is scheduled to take effect on October 5.
TikTok closes Nashville office, cuts 250 jobs
The WARN notice described the action as a permanent closure, with the affected operation located at 827 19th Ave. South in Nashville.
Employees at the facility are not represented by a collective bargaining agreement and do not have bumping rights.
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TikTok said the decision is intended to streamline operations and better align teams for long-term growth.
The company also said the move is specific to its Nashville operation as it seeks to bring teams closer together.
The closure represents a notable reversal from TikTok’s relatively recent expansion in the city.
In April 2024, TikTok signed a lease for approximately 143,610 square feet in Nashville’s Moore Building on Music Row.
The transaction was the largest office lease completed in Nashville during the first quarter of that year.
TikTok layoffs follow major U.S. ownership overhaul
The shutdown comes only months after TikTok’s U.S. business underwent a sweeping ownership and governance overhaul.
As TheStreet previously reported, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance reached a deal late last year to place TikTok’s U.S. operations under a new entity controlled by majority American investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX.
TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC was formally established in January 2026, with Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX each holding a 15% stake and ByteDance retaining 19.9%.
The company said the joint venture was established to comply with U.S. regulatory requirements and now supports more than 200 million American TikTok users and 7.5 million businesses.
The new entity was built on TikTok’s existing U.S. Data Security organization and operates separately from parts of TikTok’s global business.
It is responsible for securing U.S. user data, TikTok’s U.S. apps, and the recommendation algorithm, and for exercising decision-making authority over U.S. trust-and-safety policies and content moderation.
The joint venture is overseen by a seven-member majority-American board and led by CEO Adam Presser, who previously held senior operations and trust-and-safety roles at TikTok.
The arrangement followed years of political and legal pressure over ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok and concerns about U.S. user data and the platform’s recommendation algorithm.
TikTok was restructuring trust and safety
While TikTok had not publicly signaled that its Nashville office would close, the company had already been reshaping the trust-and-safety organization that oversees content moderation.
In February 2025, TikTok began laying off employees from its global Trust & Safety unit as part of a restructuring.
Those cuts affected teams across several international regions.
TikTok also cut hundreds of employees globally in 2024, including content moderators, as the company increased its reliance on artificial intelligence and automated moderation systems, Reuters reported.
Then, in July 2025, TikTok combined its Core Product and Trust & Safety teams into a single organization.
CEO Shou Zi Chew told employees at the time that bringing the teams together would allow TikTok to better use its technical capabilities across both business and safety operations and move faster in developing safety technology.
The same reorganization involved Presser, who later became CEO of the TikTok USDS Joint Venture, which was built on the foundation of the existing USDS organization.
The sequence suggests that TikTok’s safety operations were already undergoing significant organizational changes well before the Nashville closure.
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