Oracle Corp. named Schneider Electric SE executive Hilary Maxson as its chief financial officer to help the company navigate massive data center development plans and an accompanying cash crunch.
“Meeting this opportunity requires efficient approaches in allocating capital, delivering capacity, driving innovation, and producing profitable, recurring revenue,” Oracle said in a statement Monday, April 6.
The hire is effective immediately and Maxson will report to Clay Magouyrk, one of the company’s two CEOs. Doug Kehring had been serving as principal financial officer since Safra Catz stepped down as chief executive officer and principal financial officer last fall.
Oracle, the nearly 40-year-old software giant, has reimagined itself as a cloud infrastructure powerhouse. It is pouring tens of billions of dollars into a building artificial intelligence infrastructure to serve customers including ChatGPT creator OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc. While the company was once best known for its namesake database software, it has found success in providing data centers necessary for training and deploying AI models.
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Delivering on those grand plans has required unprecedented financial maneuvering for Oracle. Wall Street projects the company will be free cash flow negative through 2030 due to the massive scale of data center development. Recently, the firm began its largest-ever restructuring plan, which is expected to result in thousands of job cuts. Oracle has said it will raise as much as $50 billion this year through a combination of debt and equity sales.
The company’s stock has lost over half its value from a September peak over anxieties about the profitability and logistical complexity of its infrastructure plans, in addition to wider fears of an AI bubble.
Maxson was previously executive vice president and group chief financial officer at Schneider Electric, which she joined in 2017.
“The choice of an industrial company CFO highlights the importance of the buildup of AI infrastructure within Oracle, and signals that growth lies in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure segment, not databases or applications,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Anurag Rana wrote in a note on Monday.
Oracle shares briefly dipped on the news in premarket trading and were little changed at the open in New York. Catz had led Oracle’s finance operations since 2011, through the company generally stopped using the phrase “chief financial officer” after she was named co-CEO in 2014. Catz is now executive vice chair of Oracle’s board.
