By Brody Ford | Bloomberg
Oracle Corp. is planning to make Nashville its “world headquarters” to be closer to a major health care hub, reflecting the software giant’s ambitions in the industry.
At the company’s health care summit in Nashville on Tuesday, Chairman Larry Ellison said Oracle is developing a health campus in the city that will “ultimately be our world headquarters.” Nashville’s status as a health center makes it attractive, Ellison said in a conversation with Bill Frist, a physician and former US Senate majority leader, at the conference.
Oracle, best-known for its database technology, moved its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas, in 2020, saying the shift would give more flexibility to workers. The company still maintains a large employee base in California, even after the move.
Since then, Oracle has shifted its focus to the health care industry and bought electronic health records company Cerner for $28 billion. Oracle “is now going to be at the center of the next generation of health care,” Ellison said in December 2022.
Three years ago, Oracle pledged to create 8,500 jobs by 2031 in the region as part of a $1.35 billion office development in Nashville, according to the Nashville Business Journal. The paper, which earlier reported on Ellison’s comments about the new headquarters, noted that the company had more than 700 workers in the city at the end of 2023. It also said that construction hasn’t yet begun since Oracle paid $277 million for 70 acres of land on the East Bank of the Cumberland river. Nashville granted Oracle $175 million in economic incentives for the development in 2021.
Nashville has attracted corporations from across the US in recent years, driven by the relatively cheap cost of living, low taxes and state incentives. Money manager AllianceBernstein announced its move from New York to the Tennessee state capital in 2018 after evaluating 30 cities on attributes including housing, education and weather.
Norman Foster, a world-renowned architect whose firm is known for Apple Inc.’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, is designing the campus along a river in Nashville, Ellison said. “It’s the center of our future,” Ellison said of the city. He appeared to regret disclosing the intention to make Nashville its headquarters, saying that “I shouldn’t have said that.”
–With assistance from Pierre Paulden.
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