TikTok, Facing Ban, Inks Lease to Anchor Nashville Tower
Deal for 144K SF on Music Row one of largest office leases in the city in past decade.
TikTok may be facing a national ban in nine months, but the video-sharing platform continues to grow its U.S. office footprint like it expects to be operating here for a long time to come.
On Wednesday, President Biden signed a bill giving TikTok’s China-based parent ByteDance nine months to sell the popular app—which has an estimated 170M users in the U.S.—or face a national ban.
The measure, which sailed through the U.S. Senate by a 79-18 margin due to growing national security concerns about the platform, gives Biden the option of extending the deadline for 90 days.
While the president was inking the bill, TikTok was busy signing another large office lease: the Los Angeles-based company inked a deal to become the anchor tenant of a new office tower on Nashville’s famous Music Row.
The 144K SF lease TikTok signed with Atlanta-based developer Portman Holdings and Nashville’s Creed Investment covers several floors of the Moore Building, a 15-story, 247K SF office building at 827 19th Avenue that was delivered last year, CoStar reported.
According to the report, TikTok’s new lease is nearly three times larger than the space the video-sharing platform was initially expected to take, making it one of the city’s largest office deals over the past decade.
For the past two years, TikTok has operated from a WeWork outpost at the One Nashville tower, CoStar reported.
Last month, TikTok inked a deal to sublease a 162K SF building at 1143 Coleman Avenue at the Coleman Highline complex in north San Jose, a mixed-use development across the street from San Jose International Airport.
Last year, Roku put two of the four buildings at its San Jose HQ complex on the market for sublease. The Coleman Highline campus is next door to a 658K SF campus that TikTok parent Bytedance has been subleasing from Yahoo since 2022, according to a report in the San Jose Mercury News.
The report said it is not certain whether the Bytedance space as well as the newly leased office building will be used by TikTok, which would mean that the platform has a grown its footprint in San Jose to more than 820K SF.
The amount of combined space now subleased by TikTok and Bytedance in San Jose can house an estimated 4,100 tech workers. Bytedance moved into the office space in early 2023.
Earlier this year, TikTok completed a deal to lease 155K SF in Bellevue, WA in the Lincoln Square North tower, filling space that was offered for sublease by Microsoft.