How Oracle is ‘promoting’ its new Nashville campus among its employees

Oracle‘s other major hubs. Senior Vice President Scott Twaddle stated that the company is “creating a world-leading cloud and AI hub” to attract top talent from across the country.

In a statement to Bloomberg, Twaddle said: “We’re creating a world-leading cloud and AI hub in Nashville that is attracting top talent locally, regionally, and from across the country. We’ve seen great success recruiting engineering and technical positions locally and will continue to hire aggressively for the next several years.”

Why some Oracle employees may be hesitant about moving to Nashville

Oracle has been running hiring events for the new centre. But a common worry for employees considering a move is that Oracle has placed Nashville in a lower pay category than California or Seattle, meaning future salary increases may be likely limited, according to multiple workers who asked not to be identified, discussing private information.

Moreover, a weaker local tech job market also makes some people hesitant about relocating. Additionally, many of the jobs in Nashville require five days a week in the office, which is a change for Oracle, where many positions are remote.

This comes after Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison announced in 2024 that the company would build its “world headquarters” in Nashville. This announcement followed the software company’s move from Redwood City, California, to Austin. Under a 2021 tax incentive deal, the company pledged to create 8,500 jobs in Nashville by 2031, with average salaries above six figures.

However, Oracle has a long way to go to reach its hiring targets in Nashville. Currently, it has about 800 workers in Nashville offices, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. That’s far fewer than the number of company employees in other locations, including Redwood City, Austin and Kansas City, the headquarters of health records company Cerner, which Oracle bought in 2022.

How Oracle is promoting Nashville among its employees

Oracle’s promotional materials highlight the lack of state income tax and the city’s lively music scene to attract workers to Nashville. Some new employees say they moved because, in a difficult tech job market, the Tennessee city was the only place where Oracle offered them a job.

To accommodate all of these workers, Oracle is planning a huge campus along the Cumberland River. It will have over 2 million square feet of office space, a new bridge across the river, and a branch of the expensive sushi restaurant chain Nobu, which has locations on many properties connected to Ellison, including the Hawaiian island of Lanai.

The company’s most important worker in Nashville is Clay Magouyrk, its longtime cloud infrastructure chief, who was promoted to become one of two chief executive officers in September 2025.

Magouyrk, who went to high school and college in nearby Memphis, moved to Nashville in 2024. He relocated from Seattle, which is home to the largest Oracle Cloud centre, but has experienced job cuts and reductions in office space in recent years.

Oracle hasn’t given a timeline to finish the new campus, and for now, Magouyrk and other workers are working in a pair of towers in downtown Nashville.

“We look forward to breaking ground on this dynamic campus, which will add more public green space along the riverfront and incorporate a new pedestrian bridge, creating greater community connectivity,” Oracle’s Twaddle said. Nashville “will become our global headquarters,” he added.

For a global company like Oracle, the exact meaning of “headquarters” can be a bit unclear. Austin remains the address listed on the company’s SEC filings, and its executives are spread across the country. Meanwhile, the city where Oracle is hiring the most positions globally is Bengaluru. Still, Oracle is positioning Nashville to be at the centre of its future.

“We’re developing our Nashville location to stand alongside Austin, Redwood Shores, and Seattle as a major innovation hub. This is your chance to be part of it,” Oracle writes on its recruitment site.

What Nashville officials said about Oracle building its new world headquarters

Local officials are working weekly with Oracle on the new Nashville site and are “encouraged by the progress made,” said Ben York, CEO of the city’s East Bank Development Authority.

“In an area lacking core infrastructure and building blocks for development, we are working closely with Oracle to support the construction of their campus, and they are sharing responsibility for building some of the needed infrastructure,” York noted.

In 2021, when Nashville made the tax incentive deal with Oracle, then-Mayor John Cooper said, “We’ve needed these IT jobs. We’ve always been underweighted in IT jobs.”

After the agreement was reached, Oracle began donating more than $10,000 per year to the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce and in 2023, it gave $5,000 to Governor Bill Lee’s inaugural committee, according to public records.