Photo Credit: Tanner Boriack
TikTok is eyeing a big move into Nashville with a minimum 100,000-square-foot lease in Music Row’s Moore Building.
TikTok is looking to expand its Music City footprint with a move into a larger and more permanent Nashville office. The short-form video sharing app is eyeing a 100,000-square-foot lease in Music Row’s Moore Building, after having operated its Nashville office out of a WeWork location at One Nashville Tower since 2021.
During that time, the company had just entered the local market and signed a lease for three floors of the WeWork space at 150 Fourth Ave N. TikTok’s lease consisted of over 50,000 square feet, based on estimates owing to the size of the building’s average space per floor.
Multiple real estate sources confirm TikTok’s plans to move into the Moore Building at 827 19th Ave S, which opened in May. The 16-story building was developed by Nashville-based Creed Investment and Atlanta-based Portman Holdings, comprising 236,000 square feet of office space and 8,500 square feet of retail space on the ground floor.
But government officials in Tennessee have been among those most outspoken about TikTok’s US presence, given increasing federal concern surrounding consumer protections and the platform’s ownership by Chinese company ByteDance.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti filed a motion in September to compel TikTok to produce evidence in response to the state’s investigation of the company’s alleged violation of state consumer protection laws. Meanwhile, US Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee alongside US Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut wrote a letter to TikTok in October regarding the hiring of several high-level executives from its parent company in Beijing.
“The relationship between ByteDance and TikTok poses a unique risk to the security and privacy of TikTok’s users in the United States,” write Blackburn and Blumenthal. “TikTok executives, including personnel based in China, have been found spying on American journalists, and, in leaked recordings, its staff acknowledged that ‘everything is seen in China.’”
“TikTok’s actions appear to align with a pattern of misleading actions and broken commitments regarding serious matters related to users’ safety and national security,” they continue.
TikTok has over 1 billion monthly users, having exceeded 150 million monthly users in the US last year. The company also has nearly 7,000 US-based employees, according to a report from March 2023.
