After laying off 30k employees, Oracle has hired a CFO who manages a power plant.

Sometimes, to understand where a company is headed, it’s enough to see who they’ve hired.

Author: Kuli, Deep Tide TechFlow

The biggest layoff news stirring up the tech world recently has Oracle (not Oracle, Oracle) as the lead character: the world’s largest enterprise database company; the backend software for most banks and airlines worldwide runs on it.

According to CNBC, the company cut about 30k employees. And a few days later, it appointed a new CFO, with a total compensation package of $29.7 million.

30k people out, 1 person in.

Those who were let go reportedly received several months of severance on average, while the person coming in—just one contract equals the salary of a thousand people for a year.

The incident has sparked heated discussion on the foreign web Reddit forum, with more than 6,000 comments so far. What people are mostly angry about is that one executive’s pay equals a whole bunch of people in “cow and horse” roles, and they feel the new CFO is being paid way too much.

Executive compensation is several times, even dozens of times, that of ordinary employees at big tech companies. And this isn’t the first time the issue has been discussed; but compared with the compensation itself, what I care about more is the résumé of this new CFO.

The new CFO is named Hilary Maxson.

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

Before that, she worked at AES Corporation for 12 years. AES is a well-established U.S. power company, whose main business is building power plants and managing power grids.

In other words, the person Oracle paid $29.7 million for spent her entire career dealing with electricity. She managed power plants, managed power grids, managed companies that supply power to data centers… And then she was hired by a company that sells database software to become CFO?

There’s also a piece of cold knowledge in this choice that you may not know.

Oracle has had no independent CFO for the past 12 years; the company’s finances were managed concurrently by the former CEO Safra Catz. According to CNBC, after Catz transitioned to Executive Vice Chairman at the end of 2025, an interim financial officer temporarily covered the role for half a year.

Now the company is specifically setting up this position and recruiting someone from the energy industry—this matters far more than the compensation numbers themselves.

In Bloomberg Intelligence’s analysis of this appointment, choosing a CFO from an industrial company indicates that Oracle’s growth focus has shifted from databases and software to cloud infrastructure.

The numbers are also saying the same thing.

In Oracle’s latest financial report, cloud infrastructure revenue increased 84% year over year. This year’s capital expenditure budget is about $50 billion—almost all of it going to building AI data centers, which is more than double last year. To raise funds, the company plans to finance $50 billion through debt and equity. The total value of performance contracts already stands at $553 billion. According to public information, one of those alone with OpenAI is more than $300 billion.

A company lays off 30k people maintaining old businesses, then hands over the money and power to someone from the power industry. Read this action through, and Oracle’s management likely no longer thinks of itself as a purely software company.

But the capital markets don’t buy it—at least for now. Oracle’s stock price is down about 24% this year.

Investors’ concerns are also very specific. In the past, Oracle made money by selling database software and enterprise applications, with high profit margins; people were the biggest cost. But AI is rewriting the logic of this business: large models can automatically write SQL and automatically manage databases. The technical moat that Oracle has relied on for 47 years is being gradually worn down.

Oracle’s response is a complete change of tracks.

It’s no longer just selling software; it’s turning to building data centers for AI companies. According to public information, Oracle previously signed an infrastructure contract worth more than $300 billion with OpenAI as part of the Stargate data center plan; meanwhile, it has similar agreements with Meta and xAI, and the total value of performance contracts has surged to $553 billion.

This year, its capital expenditure budget is about $50 billion, almost entirely spent on data center construction.

The two biggest expenses of data centers are chips and electricity. Cooling requires electricity, and GPU computing requires electricity. In a large AI data center, the annual electricity bill can reach hundreds of millions of dollars.

What Oracle is building now is a “gigawatt-level” data center cluster—what does gigawatt mean? Roughly the power generation output of a nuclear power plant.

This explains why they needed to recruit talent from the power industry.

The new CFO previously managed power plants, managed power grids, and managed companies that supply power to data centers. Oracle doesn’t need a finance leader who understands software profit margins anymore; it needs someone who knows how to spend hundreds of billions to build power infrastructure—and make sure those investments ultimately pay off.

Wall Street analysts are currently optimistic. According to statistics, 27 firms have given buy ratings, with an average target price of $245—implying there’s still roughly 70% upside. But between the stock falling by a quarter and the analysts saying it can double, the question in between is the same: can Oracle truly transform from a software company into an energy infrastructure company?

At least, it has taken a step forward in its headcount structure for now. Those who left were people who wrote code for decades; the ones who came in are people who managed electricity for twenty years.

Sometimes, to understand where a company is headed, you don’t need to read its strategy PowerPoint. Just look at who it hires.