The 'Big Tech' Exodus: Oracle announces move from Silicon Valley to Texas

Late last week, Oracle became the latest in a string of tech companies to announce their relocation from Silicon Valley.

“Oracle is implementing a more flexible employee work location policy and has changed its Corporate Headquarters from Redwood City, California to Austin, Texas. We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work,” noted a spokesperson in an interview with CNBC.

The move has been partially set in motion by the coronavirus pandemic, given the “broader shift to remote work” in addition to the higher tax rates and steeper cost of living in California.

However, the shift can also be dated back to 2018, in which Oracle had opened a campus in Austin, which featured an “on-site apartment building for employees, in an effort to recruit a younger and less costly workforce”.

The move was lauded by Governor Greg Abbott via Twitter:

As CNBC has aptly noted, this is part and parcel of a greater trend trend. Hewlett Packard relocated to Houston early this December. Palantir Technologies, a data analytics software company, announced its own move to Denver from Palo Alto back in August. Perhaps the biggest piece of news comes from Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who announced last Tuesday that he had personally moved to Texas, perhaps signaling a shift in those respective companies' operations. A supporter of reduced regulation, Musk has said that government should "just get out of the way."

“If a team has been winning for too long, they do tend to get a little complacent, a little entitled and then they don’t win the championship anymore. California has been winning for too long,” Musk noted.