• President Trump has proposed that the US government get a stake in TikTok as part of a sale.
• But can the government actually own a piece of TikTok?
• Legal analysts said it could spark free-speech issues that would make the app hard to run.

TikTok needs to find a new owner for its US app to comply with a divest-or-ban law. Could it be the government?

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has repeatedly proposed that the government get some type of stake in TikTok.

"What I'm thinking about saying to somebody is buy it and give half to the United States," he said during a January 21 press conference.

In its bid to buy TikTok, AI company Perplexity AI answered Trump's call. This week, the company updated its proposal to merge TikTok's US business with its own by offering the US government half of the new entity. That's on the condition that it goes public at a valuation of at least $300 billion, a source familiar with the offer told Business Insider.

But what would happen to TikTok if the US government owns part of it? Is there a precedent for this?

While the government has controlling shares in other companies, such as Amtrak, owning a piece of a major social app would be new territory.

"It's a social-media company that has a significant platform demonstrably for political reach and communication," said Aram Gavoor, associate dean at the George Washington University Law School who focuses on issues in tech, regulation, and national security. The ownership would bring about "novel constitutional questions with regard to speech," he said.

For a TikTok sale involving the government to work, the dealmakers would need to set up editorial guardrails to prevent the US from encroaching on its users' First Amendment rights. Even then, legal analysts told BI that TikTok's content moderation, such as removing videos that violate its policies, could create an avalanche of legal challenges from the app's users.

"What would be necessary, though I'm not sure it would be sufficient, is an extremely strict separation between the government and this new TikTok entity, especially when it comes to anything editorial," said Alan Rozenshtein, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who previously served as an advisor at the Justice Department.

Let's walk through some of the big questions around a TikTok deal.

Can the government legally own TikTok?

If the government grabs a stake in TikTok, it wouldn't be the first time it's done so in a company in a moment of flux.

During the Great Recession, the government was deeply involved in various businesses, bailing out automakers and banks and taking a controlling stake in AIG, for example.

It also owns consumer-facing institutions like the US Postal Service and Amtrak.

There is some precedent for the government's financial involvement in media companies, too. The government funds the broadcasting network Voice of America, and Congress partially funds NPR and PBS through appropriations to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Each of those organizations has strict guidelines to protect editorial independence, however. NPR's ethics handbook says that its journalists have "full and final authority over all journalistic decisions." PBS said its content "must be free of undue influence from third-party funders, political interests, and other outside forces." And Voice of America has a firewall that "prohibits interference by any U.S. government official in the objective, independent reporting of news."

A version of TikTok partially owned by the government would likely need to establish similar editorial barriers as its media counterparts and provide assurances of independence.

Even if a TikTok deal establishes a government firewall, it might not hold up in court

Even if TikTok sets up contract language to keep the government out of its editorial work, it may not matter in the courts. Other government-owned entities that have attempted to define themselves as independent have faced First Amendment lawsuits and lost.

In 1994, Amtrak was sued after it tried to block a billboard from displaying political content in one of its stations. The Supreme Court ruled that the company, as a government entity, had violated the First Amendment rights of the billboard's creator.

The Supreme Court said that Amtrak, by virtue of being federally owned and controlled, "was subject to First Amendment restrictions in the same way as any other federal actor," said Jennifer Safstrom, a law professor at Vanderbilt University Law School who directs its First Amendment clinic.

In its opinion on the case, the court wrote that even though Congress attempted to establish Amtrak as independent from the US government, "it is not for Congress to make the final determination of Amtrak's status as a Government entity for purposes of determining the constitutional rights of citizens affected by its actions."

The case establishes that the government's self-characterization of how it owns a company may not stand on its own. "Courts will look beyond formal language to assess the extent of the government's entanglement," Safstrom said.

Would a government-owned TikTok be allowed to block porn and hate speech?

Many social apps block pornography and hate speech (and a ton of other stuff like content promoting eating disorders) as part of their community guidelines. But those types of expression are generally protected under the First Amendment, and a government-owned TikTok may face a flurry of legal challenges if it removes videos.

These are "uncharted waters," Safstrom said. "It's hard to know how expansive that world of litigation could be given the volume of users on that platform."

If TikTok continually gets challenged for pulling down hate speech and other unsavory content and stops a lot of its moderation work, it would be "essentially unusable and certainly very unprofitable," Rozenshtein said.

Who would control the TikTok algorithm?

The First Amendment protects the speech of TikTok users. But what about TikTok's algorithm? If the US government owns a part of TikTok, can it limit what users see?

That question remains up in the air, as algorithm decisions may qualify as "government speech," legal analysts said.

"If the government has a platform, it's not obligated to promote every person's particular point of view," Rozenshtein said. The government often makes choices as to what content it shares or doesn't share, such as last year when the State Department worked with the private sector to promote a set of music artists internationally as part of a diplomacy initiative.

He said the postal service offers a possible comparison for understanding why the government may have more discretion over the TikTok algorithm versus users' videos. The post office gets to decide what art it features on stamps, but it doesn't have the authority to limit most of what people write in the letters they send in the mail.

Ultimately, there are many unknowns as to what will happen around a TikTok sale, if ByteDance opts to sell it at all. Earlier this month, TikTok's lawyer said divesting its US app from its parent company would be "extraordinarily difficult" over any timeline.

And, of course, the Chinese government could block a ByteDance deal.

Asked on January 21 about a TikTok sale, China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson seemed open to letting a deal be "independently decided," though he added that "China's law and regulations should be observed."

Representatives for the White House, TikTok, and ByteDance did not respond to requests for comment.

• "Severance," an office thriller show, is partially filmed at a real office in suburban New Jersey.
• The office, Bell Works, was originally Bell Labs, a historic incubator for telephone technology.
• Today, the building is a mixed-use development with office space, stores, and restaurants.

Lumon Industries — the fictional employer at the center of the workplace thriller "Severance" — is probably not anyone's ideal employer.

In the Apple TV+ series, Lumon is a cult-like biotechnology company that employs, in part, "severed" workers. These employees undergo a procedure that separates their consciousness into two parts: an "outie" who goes about life on the outside, and an "innie" who toils away in the basement on mysterious tasks. As a result, their restrictive workspace is the only world that they've ever known.

Workers at the 60-year-old office complex where parts of the show are filmed, however, have the option to order caviar service and mezcal negronis at its on-site restaurant and bar.

Bell Works in Holmdel, New Jersey, a township about 30 miles south of Newark, was once a hub of technological innovation. Formerly Bell Laboratories, the 2-million-square-foot building was designed by famed architect Eero Saarinen for a division of AT&T and opened in 1962.

At first, it was where scientists researched and developed technologies for phones and other devices. In 2015, though, it was transformed into a walkable complex of modernized office space plus restaurants, bars, shops, and more.

While Bell Works may still look huge and monolithic from the outside, its interior is more bustling and alive than the sterile and mundane aesthetic of the show suggests.

Here are four facts about the office building used as a filming location for "Severance."

1. Only parts of Lumon's office are filmed at Bell Works

"Severance" features Bell Works' exterior and entrance, as well as its actual parking lot.

Its central, iconic skylit atrium also appears in a few scenes.

The rest of the show was filmed in New York on several sound stages, according to Curbed.

Production designer Jeremy Hindle built the interior of the office from the ground up — from the narrow hallways throughout to the iconic green carpet.

"Green is the most common color to your eye, like that's the theory that it's calming, it makes you feel calm," Hindle told Variety in 2022. "Some of the colors, the theories were kind of who they are as characters and what they needed to survive. I think green is something you need to survive."

2. The original Bell Labs building was a tech incubator

While nobody in the show knows what Lumon Industries' severed employees really do, we have records of what developments have emerged from work in the Bell Labs building.

From 1962 to 2007, the Bell Labs building had over 6,000 employees — including a few Nobel Prize winners — who were responsible for many technological innovations.

The theory for the laser, as well as the Big Bang Theory, originated in the Bell Labs building. It's also the location of the receiving end of the first cellphone call.

Bell Labs is now a mixed-use development called Bell Works

Inside, the current Bell Works building is nothing like the office in "Severance." It's also much changed from its original look, thanks to some recent renovations.

A New Jersey-based firm, Somerset Development, purchased the building in 2013 for $27 million with plans to modernize the outdated and unused office building.

"The greatest experiment is yet to come for these walls, and that is the ability of a community to come together," Somerset Development president Ralph Zucker told NJ.com in 2013. "This building will be repurposed as a place for living."

Somerset renamed it Bell Works, which is now a mixed-use building with office space, retail, and dining. It also hosts conferences and events.

More than 70 vendors have set up shop in Bell Works, including local eateries, a bar, an indoor golf simulator, and a basketball court for tenants that is sometimes open to the public. There's also fitness franchise F45 and ice cream shop Jersey Freeze.

Tenant companies include local utility Jersey Central Power & Light, HR recruiting software iCIMS, and major insurer Guardian Life.

Bell Works' website calls it a "Metroburb," which it defines as "a little metropolis in suburbia."

The show spent almost 5 times as much money filming the second season in New Jersey

The budget for the second season of "Severance" is nothing to sniff at.

According to NJ.com, during its first season, the show spent $5.1 million filming in New Jersey. The second season eclipsed that number by a lot after spending more than $24 million over three years filming in New Jersey.

Kings Landing, a condominium complex in Middletown, New Jersey, was another filming location, and part of Palisades Interstate Park in Alpine, New Jersey, which overlooks the Hudson River, was also used.

Further north, Phoenicia Diner in the Catskills was used to film scenes at Pip's Bar & Grille.

Palmer Haasch contributed reporting to this story.

• A series of companies have rolled back DEI initiatives amid pressure from conservative groups and the White House.
• Some CEOs have voiced their support or defended the diversity programs at their companies.
• Deutsche Bank's CEO is the latest bank executive to defend DEI efforts.

The list of CEOs who are publicly backing their company's DEI policies is growing.

Deutsche Bank CEO Christian Sewing is the latest, joining JPMorgan's Jaime Dimon and Goldman Sachs' David Solomon in publicly defending DEI programs amid wider external criticism of diversity initiatives from conservative activists and President Trump's new administration.

One of Trump's first executive orders placed federal DEI staffers on administrative leave while work began to dismantle their departments.

The pull-back on DEI in the private sector began before Trump took office. A slew of companies — including Meta, Walmart, and McDonald's — either reduced or ended their own DEI initiatives. Some had been targeted by conservative activist groups.

However, amid the tensions around DEI, some executives are taking a public stance in support of their firm's policies.

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The Trump administration's freeze on foreign aid threatens to derail global efforts to fight disease outbreaks, counter terrorism, and provide humanitarian assistance to people affected by conflict.

Why it matters: President Trump's desire to shape an "America first" foreign policy — which was also a focus of his first term — could alter America's posture on the world stage and impact communities around the world.

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• The U.S. government is the single largest humanitarian donor in the world, according to the United Nations.
• The foreign aid freeze undermines the U.S.' standing as a "reliable and credible partner" for its allies when they face crises, Michelle Strucke, director of the Humanitarian Agenda and Human Rights initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told Axios.

Driving the news: The State Department issued the freeze on all foreign assistance for 90 days last week, effectively implementing an executive order signed by Trump on his first day in office.

• The freeze also includes a review of all federal assistance programs to ensure they align with Trump's foreign policy agenda.
• The only initial exemptions were for emergency food programs and military aid to Israel and Egypt were exempted from the freeze, per AP.

Zoom in: Amid widespread confusion and upheaval across the humanitarian sector, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he had signed an additional waiver for "life-saving humanitarian assistance."

• The waiver signed Tuesday claimed that the exemptions would apply to "core life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance."
• It specified that it would not include areas targeted by the Trump administration, such as "activities that involve abortions, family planning conferences … gender or DEI ideology programs, transgender surgeries, or other non-life saving assistance."

Between the lines: Despite the State Department's efforts to clarify the terms of the freeze, confusion persists among international aid workers.

• Many humanitarian organizations are still seeking clarity on what qualifies as "life-saving" assistance, the Washington Post reported.
• Asia Russell, executive director of Health GAP, an advocacy organization focused on HIV treatment that collaborates with groups impacted by the freeze, told Axios the new waiver was "meaningless" and that "massive disruptions are still in effect and threatening literally millions of lives."
• "People are right to be confused, because there's only been a two paragraph communication," she said, denouncing the lack of guidance of how to implement the waiver in practice.
• Even once a guidance is issued, the chaos is likely to continue. "When you trigger massive ... programs to fire their staff, they can't start back up again overnight," Russell noted.

The State Department did not immediately respond to Axios' request for comment.

What is foreign assistance?

Foreign assistance is a conduit for helping the U.S. achieve its foreign policy goals.

• This foreign aid is often distributed by the government in the form of grants to support projects implemented by NGOs, businesses, foreign governments, or even U.S. government agencies, per a Nov. 2024 report from the Congressional Research Service.
• Foreign assistance can also come in the form of direct budget assistance — essentially, cash — to foreign governments and multilateral organizations, like the UN, per the report.

By the numbers: The U.S. spent roughly $70 billion in foreign assistance in the 2022 fiscal year, the latest year for which comprehensive data is available, the CRS report stated.

• This accounted for about 1% of the total federal budget.

What kinds of humanitarian aid is included?

U.S. foreign assistance is critical to sustaining a plethora of humanitarian and relief efforts around the world.

• In 2024, the U.S. provided more than 40% of the UN's humanitarian aid budget.
• Foreign assistance grants are also critical to sustaining the work done by public health organizations and demining organizations.

The big picture: In the wake of the freeze, public health partners and contractors that work with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) were ordered to halt the supply of critical drugs for the treatment of HIV, malaria and tuberculosis as part of the freeze, Reuters reported.

• This includes programs like the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), created by former President George W. Bush.
• The State Department's backpedaling with the issuance of a humanitarian aid waiver has still led to disruptions for PEPFAR, with many health clinics in southern Africa remaining closed amid the confusion, the New York Times reported.
• For some clinics, there has been "absolute chaos" around the dispensing of HIV-related medications and the processing of blood samples, Russell noted.
• Former USAID official Atul Gawande warned in an X post Saturday that the freeze would do "serious damage to the world and the U.S.," noting that the freeze would impact global efforts to fight Marburg virus, monitor bird flu outbreaks, and eradicate polio.

What else does foreign assistance cover?

Some U.S. foreign assistance falls outside of the scope of traditional humanitarianism.

• Charles Lister, director of the Middle East Institute's Syria and Countering Terrorism & Extremism programs, pointed out in an X post Monday that the freeze would also impact security at camps in northeast Syria where ISIS members and their families are held.
• In the wake of the aid freeze, some camp guards stopped showing up for work. The State Department quickly worked to push through an exemption and resume funding Tuesday, Lister posted on X.
• "We narrowly escaped disaster and it just shows this team has no idea what they're doing," an unnamed U.S. official told Politico.

State of play: Counterterrorism is an "objective of a significant amount of U.S. foreign assistance," Strucke told Axios.

• Foreign assistance can also include funding for counternarcotics operations in places like Colombia, an initiative that the first Trump administration prioritized, she added.
• Cutting off funding for such operations could lead to increased drug trafficking, including into the U.S., she noted.
• For Ukraine, while the freeze doesn't impact U.S. military aid, it could hit funding for humanitarian assistance, such as for programs that promote accountability for Russian war crimes, Strucke noted.

Go deeper: Federal funding freeze sparks health care chaos

• Cloud and inference providers see rising demand for Nvidia H200 chips due to DeepSeek's AI models.
• DeepSeek's open-source models require powerful hardware to run the full model for inference.
• The trend runs counter to the Nvidia sell-off following growing awareness of DeepSeek.

Some cloud providers are experiencing a notable uptick in demand for Nvidia's H200 chips after Chinese AI company DeepSeek burst into the race for the winning foundation model this month.

Though the stock market caught wind of the powerful yet efficient large language model Monday, sending Nvidia's stock down 16%, DeepSeek, has been on the radar of AI researchers and developers since it released its first model, V2, in May 2024.

But the performance of V3, released in December, is what made AI developers sit up and take notice. When R1, the company's reasoning model, which competes with OpenAI's o1, was released in early January, demand for Nvidia's H200s started climbing.

"The launch of DeepSeek R1 has significantly accelerated demand for H200. We've seen such strong interest that enterprises are pre-purchasing large blocks of Lambda's H200 capacity, even before public availability," said Robert Brooks, founding team member and vice president of revenue at cloud provider Lambda.

DeepSeek's models are open source, which means users pay very little to use them. However, they still need hardware, or a cloud computing service to use them at scale.

Business Insider spoke with 10 cloud service and AI inference providers. Five reported a rapid increase in demand for Nvidia's H200 graphics processing units this month.

Amazon Web Services and Coreweave declined to comment. Oracle, Google, and Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment.

This week, AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia have made DeepSeek models available on their various cloud and AI-developer platforms, or provided instructions for users to do so themselves.

Nvidia declined to comment, citing a quiet period before its February 26 earnings release.

AI cloud offerings have exploded in the last two years, creating a slew of options beyond the mainstays of cloud computing like Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services.

The demand has come from a range of customers from startups and individual researchers to massive multinational firms.

"We've heard from half a dozen of the 50 largest companies in the world. I'm really not exaggerating," Tuhin Srivastava, cofounder of inference provider Baseten, told BI.

Friday, semiconductor industry analysts at Seminanalysis reported "tangible effects" on pricing for H100 and H200 capacity in the market stemming from DeepSeek.

Total sales of Nvidia H200 GPUs have reached the "double digits billions, CFO Colette Kress said on the company's November earnings call.

'Exponential demand' for Nvidia H200s

Karl Mozurkewich and his team at cloud provider Valdi saw H200 demand ramp up throughout January and at first, they didn't know why.

The Valdi team doesn't own chips, it acquires capacity from existing data centers and sells that capacity to customers. The company doesn't know every use case for each chip it makes accessible, but it polled several H200 customers and all of them wanted the chips to run DeepSeek.

"Suddenly, R1 got everybody's attention — it caught fire — and then it kind of went exponential," Mozurkewich said.

American companies are eager to take advantage of DeepSeek's model performance and reasoning innovations, but most are not keen to share their data with a Chinese firm. That means they can either use an API offered by a US firm or run the model on their own hardware.

Since the model is open source, it can be downloaded and run locally without sharing data with DeepSeek.

For Valdi, the majority of its H200 demand is coming from startups, Mozurkewich said.

"It appears the market is reacting to DeepSeek by grabbing the best GPUs available for testing as quickly as possible," he said. "This makes sense, as most companies' current GPUs are likely to continue to work on ongoing tasks they've been allocated to," Mozurkewich continued.

Though many companies are still testing and experimenting, the Valdi team is seeing longer-term requests for additional hardware, suggesting an uptick in demand that could last beyond DeepSeek's initial hype cycle.

Chip light, compute-heavy

DeepSeek's models were trained with less powerful hardware than US models, according to the company's research paper. This efficiency has spooked the stock market.

Players like Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft have invested billions in AI infrastructure, with billions more on the way. Investors are concerned about whether all that capacity will be needed. DeepSeek was created with fewer, relatively weak chips (though the number is hotly debated).

Training chips aside, using the models for inference is a compute-intensive task, cloud providers say.

"It is not light and easy to run," Srivastava said.

The size of a model is measured in "parameters." More parameters require more compute. The most powerful versions of DeepSeek's models have 678 billion parameters. That's less than OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 which has 1.76 trillion, but more than Meta's largest Llama model, which has 405 billion.

Srivastava said most firms were avoiding the 405 billion parameter Llama model if they coud help it since the smaller version was much easier to run. DeepSeek offers smaller versions too, and even its most powerful version is cheaper to run, which has stoked excitement with firms who want to use the full model, the cloud providers said.

H200 chips are the only widely available Nvidia chip that can run DeepSeek's V3 model in its full form on a single node (8 chips designed to work together).

You can also spread it across more lower-power GPUs, but that requires more expertise and leaves room for error. Adding that complexity almost inevitably slows down performance, Srivastava said.

Nvidia's Blackwell chips will also be able to handle the full V3 model in one node, but these chips have just begun shipping this year.

With demand spiking, finding enough chips to run V3 or R1 at high speed is tough if it hasn't already been allocated.

Baseten doesn't own GPUs; it buys capacity from data centers that do and then tinkers with all the software connections to make models run smoothly. Some of its customers have their own hardware in their own data centers but still hire Baseten to optimize model performance.

Its customers especially value inference speed — the speed that enables an AI-generated voice to converse in real time for example. DeepSeek's capacity at the open source price is a game-changer for its customers, according to Srivastava.

"It does feel like this is an inflection point," he said.

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