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Oracle Corp., one of Silicon Valley’s oldest companies, is moving its headquarters to Austin and becoming the latest tech company to relocate outside the Golden State.
The company confirmed the move to MarketWatch on Friday. Bloomberg was the first to report the development.
“We recently announced that Oracle is implementing a more flexible employee work location policy and has changed its Corporate Headquarters from Redwood Shores, California, to Austin, Texas,” a spokeswoman said Friday. “We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work. 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 ORCL, +1.90%, which was founded in 1977 and is a global company, says on its website that it has 135,000 employees. The company’s statement Friday said it will “continue to support major hubs for Oracle around the world,” also mentioning its offices in Santa Monica, Seattle, Denver, Orlando and Burlington. Oracle did not provide a timeline for the move.
Other tech companies that have moved their headquarters out of California since the coronavirus pandemic made remote work the norm this year include Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPE, -1.07%, which said last week it is relocating to Houston, Texas, and Palantir Technologies Inc. PLTR, +0.59%, which moved to Denver over the summer. Also this week, Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Inc. TSLA, -2.72%, said he has moved to Texas. The electric-car maker is building a new factory outside Austin.
Texas, which has lower real estate prices, no state income tax and prides itself on friendly business policies, is the most popular destination for ex-Californians, according to U.S. Census Bureau numbers. A 2019 poll by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies also cited politics as one reason Californians were considering leaving the state.
With the rise of telecommuting, some tech companies based in the Bay Area have said in the past few months that their employees can work from anywhere. That includes Facebook Inc. FB, which has said it will adjust salaries based on cost of living, and Twitter Inc. TWTR, which was early on during the pandemic announced a permanent work-from-home option for its employees.
