8 ms·

Oracle's Jump to Nashville Surprises Austin

49 points by dcgudeman 2y ago

throwaway5752 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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/ https://goodjobsfirst.org/gajs/
  - supernovae 2y ago
    Abbott claws back from the population all the time but will never touch businesses. I don't know they received monetary compensation to move here, but they did tear down affordable housing and a few apartment complexes to build their campus here so that sucks.
  - jiaaro 2y ago
    The linked article says, in reference to Oracle relocating its HQ to Austin: > Oracle, which was founded in Santa Clara, Calif., in 1977, later had its headquarters in Redwood City. The software giant, at the time of its move to Texas, said that relocation was to allow a more flexible approach to its workforce > The company had neither asked for nor received economic incentives from Austin to relocate, said city officials. Nashville pledged $175 million in incentives and the state of Tennessee $65 million to help build the Oracle campus in 2021
    - tedunangst 2y ago
      So it would be technically correct to say that Oracle has not returned any tax incentives to Austin.
- pixl97 2y ago
  >Hopefully TX officials were smart You sure asking a lot from the Texan politicians down here....
  - neverartful 2y ago
    Especially true for the ones that govern Austin.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago
  > 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.
- thefourthchime 2y ago
  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?
hartator 2y ago
To be fair, Oracle Austin HQ was on the worst part of Austin (East Riverside).
- blovescoffee 2y ago
  Yeah that's definitely why they moved /s
balozi 2y ago
Oracle is working its way to some Washington suburb. Somewhere in Northern Virginia. Returning home.
harles 2y ago
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.
39896880 2y ago
https://archive.is/no1cS https://archive.is/no1cS
rdtsc 2y ago
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.
- tivert 2y ago
  > 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.
  - rdtsc 2y ago
    > 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't be stupid). As many have noted, it's a great way to filter out your top performers and keep all the low performers. Oh, I agree. At a high enough level, bean counters just see it as a cost line in a spreadsheet. "We'll either hire H1B workers or new college grads. Look how much money we saved!"
  - madrox 2y ago
    There's lots of examples of outcomes from moves like this in the industry, so you'd have to be pretty naive to not expect these effects. Therefore, it's more likely these outcomes are intended. I'm ready to believe this is intended by Oracle. It's such an institutional organization at this point that they've abstracted away a lot of the impact of individual performance (high and low).
  - 2y ago
ergonaught 2y ago
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.
- ketanmaheshwari 2y ago
  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?
  - pchristensen 2y ago
    Some unambiguous ones: cost of living, ability to buy a house (maybe less of an issue for executives), lower taxes (much bigger issue for executives). Others that vary by person: political conservatism, smaller city, closer to everything besides the West Coast.
  - ergonaught 2y ago
    TN does not have a state income tax, and no longer taxes interest/dividend income either. Cost of housing is about an order of magnitude lower. Property taxes are lower. For the most part a radically lower population density. If you cross the Atlantic a lot, you don't have to spend 6 hours crossing North America first. If you're inspired to make The Handmaid's Tale a reality, don't like a whole lot of racial diversity, and love you some guns, TN and a majority of its population are friendlier to you.
    - rayiner 2y ago
      In practice the south is more "racially diverse" than the Bay Area, because minorities can actually afford to live near white people. Coming from Atlanta it was shocking to me how homogenous the Bay Area was.
      - IncreasePosts 2y ago
        55% of the Bay area is Hispanic, Asian, or Pacific Islander. The major point how they differ is that the south has far more black people and fewer hispanics and Asians, vs the bay area having far more hispanics and Asians and far fewer blacks.
oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]
hinkley 2y ago
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.
- spicyusername 2y ago
  What bad things would one say about TVA?
  - throwaway4220 2y ago
    Controlled relocation and flooding of towns for dams I think although I don’t have a good source
  - hinkley 2y ago
    Well there was that time they dumped 1.1 billion gallons of fly ash slurry into a river, just off the top of my head. When I lived in the midwest I vaguely recall people complaining about them for other reasons (but PGE seems to be doing more for people to bitch about. Or more precisely, doing less than they should). I have the vaguest of recollections of foot dragging around coal plant emissions but that could just be the 1.1 BILLION GALLONS of fly ash water talking.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  Lower latency so the sales team can send out demands for license upgrades faster?
  - hinkley 2y ago
    I was thinking more their attempts at Cloud but your version is more sardonic.
- billh 2y ago
  Also Google and Facebook have both recently constructed large data centers just outside of Nashville. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/montgomery-county/ https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/montgomer... https://www.facebook.com/GallatinDataCenter/ https://www.facebook.com/GallatinDataCenter/
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related: Oracle founder Larry Ellison announces plans to move world HQ to Nashville https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40148604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40148604
alephnerd 2y ago
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-moving-into-nashville-as-part-of-1-35b-project.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/ehrs/oracle-health-mov...
- DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
  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.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    > Does Oracle have much growth of their core RDBMS database product Not really, and Oracle has clearly known that too for a decade. They tried a pivot into cloud (they did a similar thing with Oracle Linux decades ago), and did a similar pivot into the Healthcare IT space over the past decade. > HIPAA-like regulation for healthcare info that coincidentally only Oracle DB complies with It's a competitive space. Epic, Microsoft, AWS, and other companies can also meet those RFCs.
egberts1 2y ago
Perhaps, they keep Austin TOO weird.

49 points by dcgudeman 2y ago

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 2y ago
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/ https://goodjobsfirst.org/gajs/
- supernovae 2y ago
  Abbott claws back from the population all the time but will never touch businesses. I don't know they received monetary compensation to move here, but they did tear down affordable housing and a few apartment complexes to build their campus here so that sucks.
- jiaaro 2y ago
  The linked article says, in reference to Oracle relocating its HQ to Austin: > Oracle, which was founded in Santa Clara, Calif., in 1977, later had its headquarters in Redwood City. The software giant, at the time of its move to Texas, said that relocation was to allow a more flexible approach to its workforce > The company had neither asked for nor received economic incentives from Austin to relocate, said city officials. Nashville pledged $175 million in incentives and the state of Tennessee $65 million to help build the Oracle campus in 2021
  - tedunangst 2y ago
    So it would be technically correct to say that Oracle has not returned any tax incentives to Austin.
pixl97 2y ago
>Hopefully TX officials were smart You sure asking a lot from the Texan politicians down here....
- neverartful 2y ago
  Especially true for the ones that govern Austin.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> 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.
thefourthchime 2y ago
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?

hartator 2y ago

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

blovescoffee 2y ago
Yeah that's definitely why they moved /s

balozi 2y ago

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

harles 2y ago

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.

39896880 2y ago

https://archive.is/no1cS https://archive.is/no1cS

rdtsc 2y ago

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.

tivert 2y ago
> 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.
- rdtsc 2y ago
  > 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't be stupid). As many have noted, it's a great way to filter out your top performers and keep all the low performers. Oh, I agree. At a high enough level, bean counters just see it as a cost line in a spreadsheet. "We'll either hire H1B workers or new college grads. Look how much money we saved!"
- madrox 2y ago
  There's lots of examples of outcomes from moves like this in the industry, so you'd have to be pretty naive to not expect these effects. Therefore, it's more likely these outcomes are intended. I'm ready to believe this is intended by Oracle. It's such an institutional organization at this point that they've abstracted away a lot of the impact of individual performance (high and low).
- 2y ago

ergonaught 2y ago

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.

ketanmaheshwari 2y ago
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?
- pchristensen 2y ago
  Some unambiguous ones: cost of living, ability to buy a house (maybe less of an issue for executives), lower taxes (much bigger issue for executives). Others that vary by person: political conservatism, smaller city, closer to everything besides the West Coast.
- ergonaught 2y ago
  TN does not have a state income tax, and no longer taxes interest/dividend income either. Cost of housing is about an order of magnitude lower. Property taxes are lower. For the most part a radically lower population density. If you cross the Atlantic a lot, you don't have to spend 6 hours crossing North America first. If you're inspired to make The Handmaid's Tale a reality, don't like a whole lot of racial diversity, and love you some guns, TN and a majority of its population are friendlier to you.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    In practice the south is more "racially diverse" than the Bay Area, because minorities can actually afford to live near white people. Coming from Atlanta it was shocking to me how homogenous the Bay Area was.
    - IncreasePosts 2y ago
      55% of the Bay area is Hispanic, Asian, or Pacific Islander. The major point how they differ is that the south has far more black people and fewer hispanics and Asians, vs the bay area having far more hispanics and Asians and far fewer blacks.

oldpersonintx 2y ago

[dead]

hinkley 2y ago

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.

spicyusername 2y ago
What bad things would one say about TVA?
- throwaway4220 2y ago
  Controlled relocation and flooding of towns for dams I think although I don’t have a good source
- hinkley 2y ago
  Well there was that time they dumped 1.1 billion gallons of fly ash slurry into a river, just off the top of my head. When I lived in the midwest I vaguely recall people complaining about them for other reasons (but PGE seems to be doing more for people to bitch about. Or more precisely, doing less than they should). I have the vaguest of recollections of foot dragging around coal plant emissions but that could just be the 1.1 BILLION GALLONS of fly ash water talking.
bastawhiz 2y ago
Lower latency so the sales team can send out demands for license upgrades faster?
- hinkley 2y ago
  I was thinking more their attempts at Cloud but your version is more sardonic.
billh 2y ago
Also Google and Facebook have both recently constructed large data centers just outside of Nashville. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/montgomery-county/ https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/locations/montgomer... https://www.facebook.com/GallatinDataCenter/ https://www.facebook.com/GallatinDataCenter/

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related: Oracle founder Larry Ellison announces plans to move world HQ to Nashville https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40148604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40148604

alephnerd 2y ago

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-moving-into-nashville-as-part-of-1-35b-project.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/ehrs/oracle-health-mov...

DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
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.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > Does Oracle have much growth of their core RDBMS database product Not really, and Oracle has clearly known that too for a decade. They tried a pivot into cloud (they did a similar thing with Oracle Linux decades ago), and did a similar pivot into the Healthcare IT space over the past decade. > HIPAA-like regulation for healthcare info that coincidentally only Oracle DB complies with It's a competitive space. Epic, Microsoft, AWS, and other companies can also meet those RFCs.

egberts1 2y ago

Perhaps, they keep Austin TOO weird.