TikTok’s US joint venture is shutting down its Nashville office and laying off 250 employees, according to a report by The New York Times. 

The office, which included members of the platform’s content moderation team, will close on October 5. The official closure notice also appears in the 2026 Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) reports on the Tennessee Department of Labor & Workforce Development website.

Employees in the city’s Music Row district were notified by email on Wednesday morning, The Times report said. Several workers told The Times they were immediately logged out of company devices and informed they would receive severance packages.

A spokesperson for the TikTok USDS Joint Venture confirmed the closure and said it was intended to “streamline our operations and better align our teams for long-term growth.” The company did not explicitly link the layoffs to the increasing use of artificial intelligence for content moderation, though the industry has been shifting more moderation tasks to automated systems.

The Nashville office occupied nearly 145,000 square feet of space and was leased in 2024. The building that houses it was sold in July for just under $147 million. TikTok said the workers at the site are not represented by a collective bargaining agreement.

The US joint venture was formed in January after ByteDance spun off an American entity to run TikTok in the United States, complying with a 2024 federal law aimed at addressing national security concerns over ties to Beijing. Under the arrangement, non-Chinese investors hold about 80% of the venture, with ByteDance retaining a 19.9% stake.