TikTok's parent just sold its gaming empire for $6B

ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, just agreed to sell its gaming studio Moonton — creator of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang — to Saudi Arabia's Savvy Games Group for $6 billion. The deal marks ByteDance's final exit from gaming and its biggest signal yet that the company is going all-in on artificial intelligence.

ByteDance bought Moonton in 2021 for roughly $4 billion. Three years later, it's walking away with a $2 billion profit — and redirecting the cash toward AI infrastructure.

A game with 1.5 billion downloads — gone

Mobile Legends: Bang Bang isn't a small game. It's been downloaded 1.5 billion times across 139 countries, pulls in 110 million monthly players, and dominates mobile gaming in Southeast Asia. Its M7 World Championship Grand Finals in January 2026 drew 5.68 million peak concurrent viewers — the most-watched mobile esports event ever.

Moonton CEO Zhang Yunfan told employees the studio will remain based in Shanghai under his leadership. Staff will receive accelerated vesting of long-term incentives as part of the transition. "This transaction marks a natural next step in its journey," a ByteDance spokesperson said.

ByteDance is betting everything on AI

This sale is the last piece of ByteDance's gaming exit. In 2024, the company already sold three other gaming units — two to Tencent and one to a China Ruyi Holdings subsidiary. It also shut down its Nuverse arm, which published Marvel Snap.

Where is all the money going? Into AI — $23 billion worth of infrastructure spending planned for 2026 alone. ByteDance was Nvidia's largest Chinese client in 2024, and plans to buy thousands more H200 chips.

To put Doubao's scale in perspective: it hit 100 million daily users during the 2026 Lunar New Year after partnering with CCTV's Spring Festival Gala, and fielded 1.9 billion AI queries during the broadcast alone. That's nearly double DeepSeek's weekly active users.

Saudi Arabia is building a gaming superpower

The buyer, Savvy Games Group, is backed by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund and has $38 billion earmarked for gaming investments. With this deal, Savvy adds Moonton to a portfolio that already includes:

Savvy CEO Brian Ward called China "a fantastic market because it's a big one, and secondly, there's some of the best talent in the world." The Saudi fund is also reportedly pursuing Electronic Arts in a $55 billion deal expected later this year.

What this tells us about where tech is heading

ByteDance isn't alone. The broader pattern is clear: major tech companies are selling non-AI assets to fund AI infrastructure. Meta killed its $73 billion metaverse project. Now ByteDance is exiting gaming entirely. The money is all flowing in one direction.

For anyone watching the AI industry, the numbers tell the story. ByteDance's Doubao already rivals ChatGPT in daily usage within China. The company is spending $23 billion to scale it further. And it just freed up $6 billion more by selling one of the world's most popular mobile games.

Meanwhile, the gaming industry continues to consolidate. Between 2022 and 2025, roughly 45,000 gaming jobs were lost globally, with one-third of U.S. video game workers laid off. The Saudi-backed Savvy Games is becoming a dominant force — assembling a portfolio that could rival any traditional gaming giant.

The deal is expected to close in the coming months.

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