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