Oracle is the latest Silicon Valley company to head for the hills — of Austin

Oracle Corp. is the latest Silicon Valley-based company to exit California amidst the pandemic with plans to shift its headquarters to Austin.

The $39 billion-a-year tech giant announced the headquarters move in a regulatory filing after stock markets closed Friday.

“Oracle is implementing a more flexible employee work location policy and has changed its corporate headquarters from Redwood City, California to Austin, Texas,” the filing says. “We believe these moves best position Oracle for growth and provide our personnel with more flexibility about where and how they work.”

The company already had a significant presence in Austin, with a five-story, 560,000-square-foot campus overlooking Lady Bird Lake. It also has employment hubs in Redwood City and Santa Monica, Calif.; Seattle; Denver; Orlando; and Burlington, Mass.

Oracle will let employees choose where they wish to work, whether from home or at one of the company’s office locations.

“By implementing a more modern approach to work, we expect to further improve our employees’ quality of life and quality of output,” Oracle’s filing says.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott took to Twitter on Friday to tout the relocation.

“Oracle just announced they have moved their headquarters to Austin,” he tweeted. “Texas is truly the land of business, jobs, and opportunity. We will continue to attract the very best.”

A handful of other California companies and high-profile business leaders have made similar moves. Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced earlier this week at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council summit that he had moved to Austin. He had bashed California for months over its handling of the pandemic. The billionaire CEO said he was maintaining company operations in California, but he also has significant operations for Tesla and SpaceX in Texas.

In July, Musk picked Austin as the site of Tesla’s new $1.1 billion manufacturing facility, which could employ as many as 5,000 people.

Also, HP Enterprise also announced earlier this month that it would relocate its headquarters from San Jose to the Houston suburb of Spring. Palantir Technologies relocated from Palo Alto this year, landing in Denver. The tech giants Google and Apple have been expanding their presence in Austin over the last several years.

Oracle has more than 4,500 employees in Texas, and company co-founder Larry Ellison said in 2018 that he expected the corporate campus workforce in Austin to grow to as many as 10,000, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

“We have a handful of hubs in the United States, and Austin is one of the key places we want to be because that’s where we think our people want to be,” Ellison told the Statesman two years ago at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the…