Larry Ellison, co-founder and chairman of Oracle, speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2017 conference in San Francisco on October 3, 2017.
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inspiration The company will move its global headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, to be closer to a major health care hub, Chairman Larry Ellison said Tuesday.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Bill Frist, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Ellison said Oracle is moving a “massive campus” to Nashville, “which will ultimately be our global headquarters.” Nashville is an established health hub and “a great place to live,” he said, a place that excites Oracle employees.
“It's at the center of the industry we care about most, which is the health care industry,” Ellison said.
It seems that this announcement was spur of the moment. “I shouldn't have said that,” Ellison told Frist, a health care veteran who represented Tennessee in the Senate. The pair spoke during a fireside chat at the Oracle Health Summit in Nashville.
Oracle shares were mostly flat in extended trading Tuesday.
Oracle moved its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas, in 2020. The company has made significant efforts in the healthcare space in recent years, most notably through its $28 billion acquisition of medical records software giant Cerner. Ellison said Tuesday that Oracle is relatively new to the health care sector, but he believes the company has a “moral obligation” to solve problems facing the industry.
Nashville has been a major player in the healthcare scene for decades, and the city is now home to a vibrant network of health systems, startups, and investment firms. The city's reputation as a health care center was stimulated when HCA Healthcare, one of the first for-profit hospital companies in the United States, was founded there in 1968.
HCA helped attract large numbers of health care professionals to Nashville, and other organizations soon followed suit. Oracle has been developing its new $1.2 billion campus in the city for about three years, according to The Tennessean.
“Our people love it here, and we believe it is the center of our future,” Ellison said.
Oracle did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.