Software giant Oracle Corp. is planning to move its headquarters to Nashville to be closer to the center of the healthcare industry, Chairman Larry Ellison said Tuesday. The company is set to move from Austin, where it relocated only four years ago from Silicon Valley.

Oracle occupies roughly 1M SF at its headquarters in Austin and had floated plans for a 287K SF expansion there as recently as September. It isn't clear from Ellison's statements how its Austin presence would be impacted or what the timeline of a move would be.

Austin is already suffering from a sluggish office market, with vacancy at 23.1% in the first quarter, according to JLL, up 1% from the previous quarter. Net negative office absorption in Q1 totaled 354K SF.

Oracle had already committed to a Nashville footprint, agreeing to create 8,500 jobs in the city by 2031 at a 70-acre campus on the East Bank of the Cumberland River, the Nashville Business Journal reports. The campus will ultimately be the world headquarters for Oracle, Ellison said.

The city of Nashville gave Oracle $175M in incentives for the development in 2021, Bloomberg reported. Construction on that project hasn't begun.

“[Nashville's] the center of the industry we’re most concerned about, which is the healthcare industry,” Ellison said during a one-on-one conversation with former U.S. Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee at the company's healthcare conference in Nashville this week, as reported by various media outlets.

Oracle, best known as a database specialist, acquired electronic health records company Cerner for $28B in late 2021, among other pivots recently into the healthcare sector.