President Donald Trump will speak with Chinese leader Xi Jinping after the U.S. and China agreed the outline of a deal that would resolve the dispute over who owns TikTok.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said trade talks with Chinese officials in Madrid, Spain, had gone “very well,” adding: “A deal was also reached on a ‘certain’ company that young people in our country very much wanted to save… I will be speaking to President Xi on Friday. The relationship remains a very strong one.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent later confirmed that a framework agreement had been reached after the negotiations. “We have a framework for a TikTok deal,” Bessent said Monday, adding that the leaders’ conversation on Friday would “complete the deal.”
Bessent declined to describe the terms of the deal, but he added that the agreement is “between two private parties” and that “the commercial terms have been agreed upon.”
TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, had faced a Wednesday deadline to reach a deal that would allow the app to keep running in the U.S., where its operations have been under pressure since the Biden administration enacted a bipartisan law requiring ByteDance to either sell the app to a U.S. buyer or face a ban, which was later upheld by the Supreme Court. Since returning to office, Trump has repeatedly extended the deadline for enforcement.
The Madrid talks were focused on the social media app, but U.S. officials also discussed wider trade issues with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng’s team, said U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, also in Spain, earlier in the day. However, the two sides had not “found a path forward on that,” and Greer added that Chinese officials made “aggressive asks” during the talks.
Officials from both sides have stepped up contact in recent weeks, aiming to prepare for a possible meeting between Trump and Xi at a summit in South Korea. Talks lasted almost six hours on Sunday, covering technology, trade, and the wider economy, officials said.
The TikTok agreement came on the same day Beijing said Nvidia $NVDA had broken a competition law with a deal it completed five years ago, a decision that could complicate further trade talks. Chinese regulators on Monday released findings from a first review of Nvidia’s $7 billion purchase of Mellanox Technologies. Regulators said the deal broke competition rules and that a longer probe will follow, without giving details on possible penalties.
The deal was approved in 2020 on the condition that Nvidia treat Chinese firms fairly. Nvidia’s stock fell about 1.5% in Monday trading after the announcement. Nvidia has become a key player in the wider tech dispute between the two countries. U.S. rules block sales of its most advanced computer chips to China, leading the company to redesign products. Beijing has since urged local companies to avoid Nvidia’s H20 chip.
The chip dispute has also widened further in recent days, after China opened cases against U.S. suppliers over the weekend, including a pricing investigation into some products from chip company Texas Instruments $TXN.
—Britney Nguyen contributed to this article.