Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison tags Nashville as company's next world HQ

Oracle Corp. co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison has indicated that Nashville, not Austin, will be the company's headquarters in the future. Ellison made the declaration April 23 during an on-stage interview at a health care industry summit Oracle hosted in Nashville. It marked Ellison's first public appearance in Nashville in the nearly three years since Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) – one of the world's 30 largest public companies — cemented a deal to create 8,500 jobs by 2031 on a $1.35 billion, 70-acre campus on the East Bank. Construction has yet to begin, but plans indicate it will be a bigger deal than Oracle's Austin campus, where Oracle reports it has 2,500 workers. "Ultimately, [Nashville] will be our world headquarters," Ellison told a packed ballroom inside Midtown's Conrad hotel. "It's the center of our future." The company, which makes database software and other products, had been based in California for most of its existence since Ellison co-founded it in 1977.

In late 2020, Oracle designated Austin as its new headquarters. In summer 2022, Oracle paid $28.3 billion to buy health care technology company Cerner Corp., a move that underpins much of Ellison's reasoning for why he wants to make Nashville the company's new headquarters. It's not immediately clear what this means for Oracle's operations in Austin, where it's the 14th largest tech employer in the region by headcount. It also begs the question: what is a headquarters? When Oracle disclosed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2020 that Austin is its new headquarters, it doesn't appear anything changed in the Texas capital. Neither Oracle's chairman or its CEO, Safra Catz, have called Austin their home base. There were no reported spikes in employment in Austin after the announcement. Despite the uncertainty of Oracle's HQ designation, the software giant is still bullish on Austin. In September it filed plans with the city of Austin to add a third office building to its riverfront headquarters campus near downtown Austin, plus it could also build a hotel. Oracle's existing office buildings total nearly 1 million square feet. Oracle opened its Austin office in 2018. At the time, the company said the campus could eventually grow to 10,000 employees.