Larry Ellison, co-founder and chairman of Oracle, speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2017 conference in San Francisco on October 3, 2017.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said Tuesday that the company is moving its global headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, to be closer to a major healthcare epicenter.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Bill Frist, a former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Ellison said Oracle is moving a “huge campus” to Nashville, “which will ultimately become our international headquarters.” He said Nashville is an established health care center and a “fantastic place to live,” which Oracle employees are excited about.
“It’s the center of the industry we’re most concerned about, which is health care,” Ellison said.
The announcement was seemingly a snapshot. “I shouldn’t have said that,” Ellison told Frist, a health care industry veteran who represented Tennessee in the Senate. The pair spoke during a fireside chat at the Oracle Health Summit in Nashville.
Shares of Oracle were largely flat in extended trading on Tuesday.
Oracle moved its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas in 2020. The company has made a big push into healthcare in recent years, most notably with its $28 billion acquisition of software giant Cerner. Ellison said Tuesday that Oracle is relatively new to the healthcare industry, but he believes the company has a “moral obligation” to solve the problems facing the industry.
Nashville has been a major player in healthcare for decades, and the city is now home to a vibrant network of healthcare systems, startups and investment firms. The city’s reputation as a healthcare center was cemented when HCA Healthcare, one of the first for-profit hospital companies in the US, was founded there in 1968.
HCA helped attract large numbers of healthcare professionals to Nashville, and other organizations quickly followed suit. According to The Tennessean, Oracle has been developing its new $1.2 billion campus in the city for about three years.
“Our people love it here and we think this is the center of our future,” Ellison said.
Oracle did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.