Oracle moves headquarters to Texas from Silicon Valley

[December 12, 2020]  (Reuters) -Business software maker Oracle Corp said on Friday it was moving its corporate headquarters to Austin, Texas from Redwood City, California.

Oracle is the latest tech firm to exit Silicon Valley after the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a broader shift to remote work, making companies reconsider California's higher operational costs and hefty taxes.

Employees can pick their office location and choose whether to work from home part-time or full-time, Oracle said in a regulatory filing.

"We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work," the 43-year-old company said.

In 2018, Oracle set up a campus in Austin that could support a 10,000-strong workforce, in a bid to meet increasing demand for its cloud business.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a spinoff of the decades-old corporation often mentioned in the accounts of the founding of Silicon Valley, said earlier this month it would move its headquarters from California to the Lone Star State.

The Oracle logo is shown on an office building in Irvine, California, U.S. June 28, 2018. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Data analytics firm Palantir Technologies also shifted headquarters to Denver, Colorado from Palo Alto, California in August.

Earlier this week, electric car-maker Tesla Inc's Elon Musk said he had relocated to Texas from California, which has the highest personal income tax rate in the United States.

(Reporting by Eva Mathews in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath)

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