Oracle's Jump to Nashville Surprises Austin

[rdtsc]

It's interesting, when TX which looked like a winner with HQ moving there three years ago, is now left scratching their heads as Oracle keeps on trucking to another state. It's just those wonderful market incentives working "as intended". In three more years HQ will move again to Mississippi or something.

Another reason for these kind of moves is to shed workforce without going through layoffs. People with higher salaries, mortgages, houses, family will choose to resign instead relocating to TN perhaps, while new college grads, with lower salaries might be more willing to move.

[gamblor956]

Another reason for these kind of moves is to shed workforce without going through layoffs.

For legal purposes, this sort of move is treated as a layoff by nearly every state, so that's clearly not a driver behind the move.

It's usually one of 2 things: tax incentives that make the move cost-effective over a 3-7 year window, or the CEO has moved to the new state and is dragging HQ along with him.The second is actually more common than the first. Tax incentives are fairly stringent and most companies fail to satisfy the requirements to receive the full incentives offered, so moving states for purely tax reasons is uncommon these days. Additionally, most of the so-called "business friendly" states are actually more burdensome and onerous than so-called "business hostile" states. Alabama, for example, has 7 different taxes on businesses that usually end up costing businesses more than the 1 or 2 taxes that the same business would face in California. Florida and Texas will openly attempt to inflict economic damage on companies with different ideologies from their governors.

In this case, the Texas Governor is remarkably anti-business (unless it's oil), and Oracle is probably moving to a state less hostile to business.

[neverartful]

There's a big difference between Austin and the rest of Texas. Despite sharing some geography, they have little in common.

[tivert]

> Another reason for these kind of moves is to shed workforce without going through layoffs. People with higher salaries, mortgages, houses, family will choose to resign instead relocating to TN perhaps, while new college grads, with lower salaries might be more willing to move.

I hear stuff like that a lot. But that seems like the dumbest, most passive-aggressive move ever (though I'm not denying executives can be stupid). As many have noted, it's a great way to filter out your top performers and keep all the low performers.

[hinkley]

You can say many, many bad things about the Tennessee Valley Authority, but they have not had the sort of tragicomic power outages that Texas has had in the last decade.

Poking around at fiber connections it looks like some important trunk lines from Atlanta to Chicago pass through or outside Nashville, so there’s that.

It’s also a crossroads town. There are three highways that cross at Nashville.

[bastawhiz]

Lower latency so the sales team can send out demands for license upgrades faster?

[subsubzero]

A friend(neighbor) lived in Austin, alot of bad trends happening right now. You mentioned power and that made the national headlines, but they also said weather(extremely hot) was why they moved, I think it was like 40 straight days where it hit triple digits(summer 2023). Top that off with housing that is really expensive and homeless issues that are very bad and I could see why a company could relocate elsewhere.

[billh]

Also Google and Facebook have both recently constructed large data centers just outside of Nashville.

https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/montgomer...

https://www.facebook.com/GallatinDataCenter/

[glimshe]

I don't live in Nashville, but it's a pretty cool town. I was there just before the last Eclipse and I found it a vibrant and beautiful city. So it's not like they are moving to Nowhere, Alaska.

[spicyusername]

What bad things would one say about TVA?

[alephnerd]

Oracle Health has been HQed in Nashville since 2023 [0].

It seems to be a pivot related to Oracle's acquisition of Cerner a couple years ago.

After the JEDI fiasco, Oracle has gotten very deep in the Health IT space, which is a much slower and stickier industry.

[0] - https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/ehrs/oracle-health-mov...

[DaiPlusPlus]

Does Oracle have much growth of their core RDBMS database product? When I look at the software dev ecosystem right now it makes little sense to use Oracle for a greenfield project: everyone and their dog are using Postgres, even if Postgres wasn’t free it still saves you from Oracle’s onourus licensing obligations.

So perhaps Oracle sees that they’ve extracted all of the value from their RDBMS from companies that are free to choose alternatives - time to move into an industry sector with great potential for regulatory capture. So… I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see a HIPAA-like regulation for healthcare info that coincidentally only Oracle DB complies with.

[ergonaught]

So do the senior executives all work remotely after they moved HQ out of Cali?

There are a number of them that I cannot imagine living in Tennessee, despite various advantages to doing so.

[rdtsc]

They'll live in a large air conditioned mac mansion with servants, in a gated community, just like they did in CA or TX.

[ketanmaheshwari]

I am curious to know, what would be the various advantages of living in TN vs CA that you speak of? Have you lived in both these states for substantial periods?

[throwaway5752]

The stated reasons are ridiculous, it's tax incentives. They are getting a quarter of a billion dollars overall from TN. This is what happens in a race to the bottom. Hopefully TX officials were smart enough to add long term clawbacks to the incentive package they gave Oracle.

[pchristensen]

I don't know the specifics, but I'd bet a quarter billion dollars that they didn't add clawback provisions. "The Great American Jobs Scam" goes into this is great detail - https://goodjobsfirst.org/gajs/

[thefourthchime]

What does headquarters even mean these days? A building with a logo on it and an update of address on a website?

The Oracle campus in Austin is huge and beautiful and mostly empty. What's the point of actually making a building?

[TacticalCoder]

> This is what happens in a race to the bottom.

Are you saying the states should have no fiscal autonomy and everything should be decided in DC? Which, I don't doubt it, would magically happen to settle on the highest tax rates possible.

Is this the world we should strive more? Ever bigger, ever more centralized state (the US, the EU, China) pushing for ever more taxes?

What you call "race to the bottom" is competition and it allows to keep some of the states who'd be tempted to go all-in on socialism in check.

I don't want to see what happens when there's no tax competition anymore anywhere in the world. I know how it ends and it's not going to be nice.

[pixl97]

>Hopefully TX officials were smart

You sure asking a lot from the Texan politicians down here....

[harles]

Are there stats somewhere about headcount in their different offices and how much they plan to move? I usually assume things like this are symbolic or tax related without actually resulting in a massive move. Maybe it’s answered in the article - I don’t have access.

[balozi]

Oracle is working its way to some Washington suburb. Somewhere in Northern Virginia. Returning home.

[39896880]

https://archive.is/no1cS

[ChrisArchitect]

Related:

Oracle founder Larry Ellison announces plans to move world HQ to Nashville

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40148604

[hartator]

To be fair, Oracle Austin HQ was on the worst part of Austin (East Riverside).

[blovescoffee]

Yeah that's definitely why they moved /s

[egberts1]

Perhaps, they keep Austin TOO weird.