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

Author: QLi, Deep Tide TechFlow

The layoff news that has been most explosive in the tech industry lately is centered on Oracle (formerly known as Oracle), the world’s largest enterprise database company; most bank and airline back offices around the world run its software.

According to a report by CNBC, the company laid off roughly 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.

The people who left average a severance package of a few months’ pay; the person coming in, one contract equals the salary of one thousand people for a year.

This matter has sparked intense discussion on the Reddit forum on the open web. There are more than 6,000 comments so far, and most people are angry about essentially this: the pay of one executive equals that of a whole bunch of back-office drones, and they think the new CFO is paid too much.

Executive compensation is several times, even dozens of times higher than that of ordinary employees at big tech companies. This also isn’t the first time it’s been discussed; but compared with the compensation itself, what I care about more is this new CFO’s resume.

The new CFO is called Hilary Maxson.

Before coming to Oracle, she served as Group CFO at Schneider Electric for nearly ten years. Schneider Electric is one of the world’s largest energy management companies. Its core business is 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 long-established U.S. power company, whose main business is building power plants and managing power grids.

In other words, the $29.7 million that Oracle paid for this person has meant that her entire career has been dealing with electricity—managing power plants, managing power grids, managing companies that supply power to data centers… And then she was hired as CFO by a company that sells database software that has been around for 47 years?

In this choice, there’s also a piece of cold knowledge you probably didn’t know.

For the past 12 years, Oracle basically didn’t have an independent CFO. The finances were handled in parallel by former CEO Safra Catz. According to CNBC, after Catz transitioned to Executive Vice Chair at the end of 2025, a temporary finance officer was brought in to cover for about half a year.

Now the company is specifically establishing this position and recruiting talent from the energy industry. In itself, this is far more important than the compensation numbers.

Bloomberg Intelligence analysts’ interpretation of this appointment is that choosing a CFO from an industrial company shows Oracle’s growth focus has shifted—from databases and software to cloud infrastructure.

The numbers are also saying the same thing.

In Oracle’s most recent financial report, its cloud infrastructure revenue rose 84% year over year. This year’s capital expenditure budget is about $50 billion—almost all of it going toward building AI data centers, which is more than double last year. To raise money, the company plans to finance $50 billion through debt and equity. The total value of contracts to be fulfilled has already jumped to $553 billion. According to public information, of that total, a single transaction with OpenAI is already more than $300 billion.

A company lays off 30k people maintaining its old core business, and then hands the money and authority to someone who comes from the power industry. Read as it stands, Oracle’s management probably no longer thinks of itself as a pure software company.

But the capital markets don’t buy it—at least for now. Oracle’s stock price has fallen by 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, and the technical moat Oracle has relied on for 47 years is being gradually worn down.

Oracle’s response is to completely switch tracks.

It’s no longer just selling software; it’s now 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, which is part of the Stargate data center initiative. At the same time, it has similar agreements with Meta and xAI, and the total value of contracts to be fulfilled has surged to $553 billion.

This year’s capital expenditure budget is about $50 billion, and almost all of it is being poured into data center construction.

The two biggest items of spending for data centers are chips and electricity. Cooling requires electricity, and GPU computation requires electricity. For a large AI data center, the annual electricity bill can reach tens of millions of dollars.

What Oracle is trying to build now is a “gigawatt-scale” data center cluster. What does gigawatt mean? Roughly the power output of a nuclear power plant.

This is why they need to recruit talent from the power sector.

The new CFO previously managed power plants, power grids, and companies that supply power to data centers. What Oracle needs now isn’t a finance leader who understands software profit margins—it’s someone who knows how to spend hundreds of billions on power infrastructure and ensure those investments ultimately pay off.

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

At least, in terms of personnel structure, it has taken a step. The ones who left were people who wrote code for decades; the ones who came in are people 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 see who it hires.