Author: Curry, Shen Chao TechFlow

Recently, the most heated news in the tech industry has been the layoffs at Oracle, the world's largest enterprise database company; most banks and airlines around the world run its software in the back end.

According to CNBC, the company has laid off about 30,000 employees. A few days later, it appointed a new CFO, with a total compensation package of $29.7 million.

30,000 out, 1 in.

The outgoing employees received a few months' severance pay on average, while the incoming one has a contract that is equivalent to the annual salary of a thousand individuals.

This has sparked heated discussions on the Reddit forum, currently with over 6,000 comments, with many angry that one executive's salary is equivalent to that of a whole bunch of workers, feeling that the new CFO is being paid too much.

Executive salaries are multiples or even tens of times higher than those of ordinary employees in large companies, and this is not the first time it's been discussed; but compared to the salary itself, I'm more concerned with the resume of this new CFO.

The new CFO is Hilary Maxson.

Before joining Oracle, she was the Group CFO at Schneider Electric for nearly a decade. Schneider Electric is one of the largest energy management companies in the world, with a core business of providing power supply solutions for data centers and power grids, generating annual revenue exceeding $45 billion.

Prior to that, she worked at AES Corporation for 12 years. AES is a well-established American power company, primarily engaged in building power plants and managing power grids.

This means that Oracle spent $29.7 million to hire someone whose entire career has been intertwined with electricity. She has managed power plants, power grids, and companies providing power to data centers... and now she is being brought on as the CFO of a company that has been selling database software for 47 years?

There’s a lesser-known fact you might not be aware of in this choice.

Oracle has not had an independent CFO for the past 12 years; finances have been managed by former CEO Safra Catz. According to CNBC, after Catz transitions to Executive Vice Chair at the end of 2025, a transitional financial leader will temporarily take over for six months.

Now the company has specifically created this position, looking for someone from the energy sector, which itself is much more important than the salary figures.

Analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence interpret this appointment as selecting a CFO from an industrial company, indicating that Oracle's growth focus has shifted from databases and software to cloud infrastructure.

The numbers also tell the same story.

According to Oracle's latest financial report, the company's cloud infrastructure revenue increased by 84% year-over-year, with this year's capital expenditure budget of about $50 billion, almost entirely directed towards AI data center construction, more than double last year. To raise funds, the company plans to finance $50 billion through debt and equity. The total value of contracts to be fulfilled has skyrocketed to $553 billion, with public information indicating that one contract with OpenAI alone exceeds $300 billion.

A company lays off 30,000 people maintaining old businesses and then hands money and power to someone from the electricity industry. Reading this move, Oracle's management probably no longer sees itself purely as a software company.

But the capital markets are not buying it for now. Oracle's stock price has dropped about 24% this year.

Investor concerns are also very specific. Oracle has historically relied on selling database software and enterprise applications to make money, with high profit margins, as human resources are the biggest cost. However, AI is rewriting the logic of this business; large models can automatically write SQL and manage databases, the technical barriers that Oracle has relied upon for 47 years are gradually eroding.

Oracle's strategy is to completely change tracks.

Instead of just selling software, it is turning to building data centers for AI companies. According to public information, Oracle previously signed an infrastructure contract exceeding $300 billion with OpenAI, which is part of the Stargate data center project; there are also similar agreements with Meta and xAI, with total contracts to be fulfilled soaring to $553 billion.

This year's capital expenditure budget is about $50 billion, almost entirely directed at data center construction.

The two largest expenditures for data centers are chips and electricity. Cooling requires electricity; GPU computing requires electricity; an AI data center's annual electricity bill can run into hundreds of millions of dollars.

What Oracle is now building is a "gigawatt-level" cluster of data centers. What is gigawatt? It's roughly equivalent to the power generation capacity of a nuclear power plant.

This explains why they are recruiting from the electricity industry.

The new CFO has previously managed power plants, power grids, and companies providing power to data centers. What Oracle needs is no longer a financial leader who understands software profit margins, but someone who knows how to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build power infrastructure and ensure that these investments ultimately yield returns.

Wall Street analysts are currently optimistic, with statistics showing 27 have given buy ratings, with an average target price of $245, implying about 70% upside potential. However, there is a gap between a stock price drop of a quarter and analysts saying it could double, stemming from the same question: Can Oracle truly transform from a software company into an energy infrastructure company?

At least there has been a step forward in the personnel structure. Out are the people who have been writing code for decades, in come those who have managed electricity for twenty years.

Sometimes to understand where a company is going, you don't need to flip through its strategic PPT. Just look at whom it has hired.