X

Oracle to move HQ from Silicon Valley to Texas, but Ellison says aloha

"Many of our employees can choose their office location as well as continue to work from home part time or all the time," the company says.

Edward Moyer Senior Editor
Edward Moyer is a senior editor at CNET and a many-year veteran of the writing and editing world. He enjoys taking sentences apart and putting them back together. He also likes making them from scratch. ¶ For nearly a quarter of a century, he's edited and written stories about various aspects of the technology world, from the US National Security Agency's controversial spying techniques to historic NASA space missions to 3D-printed works of fine art. Before that, he wrote about movies, musicians, artists and subcultures.
Credentials
  • Ed was a member of the CNET crew that won a National Magazine Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors for general excellence online. He's also edited pieces that've nabbed prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists and others.
See full bio
Edward Moyer
2 min read
HQ no more. A building on Oracle's Redwood Shores, California, campus.

HQ no more. A building on Oracle's Redwood City, California, campus, between San Francisco and the heart of Silicon Valley.

 David Paul Morris/Getty Images

Business software and services company Oracle is changing its corporate headquarters from the Silicon Valley area to Austin, Texas, to provide its workers "with more flexibility about where and how they work," the company said Friday.

"Depending on their role, this means that many of our employees can choose their office location as well as continue to work from home part time or all the time," Oracle said in a statement. The company opened a large corporate campus in Austin in 2018, but it reportedly doesn't have any plans to move staff from its existing headquarters in Redwood City, California, to Austin.

The company said it will continue to maintain facilities around the US, including those in Redwood City, as well as in Denver; Seattle; Burlington, Vermont; Orlando, Florida; and Santa Monica, California; among others. It expects to establish new locations too, it said.

"By implementing a more modern approach to work, we expect to further improve our employees' quality of life and quality of output," the company said in its statement.

One person who's apparently not making the move to Texas: Oracle founder Larry Ellison. In a companywide message, Ellison told employees that he'd moved to Hawaii, Recode reported on Monday.

"I've moved to the state of Hawaii and I'll be using the power of Zoom to work from the island of Lanai," Ellison wrote, according to Recode. 

Related stories

Oracle isn't the only tech company that's thinking about flexibility for employees, after months of people working from home because of coronavirus lockdowns. Facebook and Twitter have both said they'll let some employees work from home permanently. But as Oracle suggests, offices may not yet be a thing of the past. Google, for one, has said it'll adopt a wait-and-see approach to remote working beyond the pandemic.

Oracle also isn't the only tech powerhouse with a thing for Texas. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk confirmed this week that he'd personally moved there. In May, Musk also tweeted that he'd be moving Tesla's headquarters to Texas or Nevada. Tesla is currently building a new factory outside Austin, and SpaceX has been operating in Texas almost since its beginnings. But both firms are still based and maintain operations in California.

And Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, a descendant of the pioneering Silicon Valley company, said earlier this month that it's moving its headquarters from San Jose, California, to Houston.

CNET's Antuan Goodwin contributed to this report.