Oracle is moving its headquarters to Nashville to be closer to the healthcare industry

oracle Chief Executive Larry Ellison said Tuesday that the corporate is moving its global headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, to be closer to a key healthcare epicenter.

In an intensive conversation with Bill Frist, a former U.S. Senate majority leader, Ellison said Oracle is moving a “huge campus” to Nashville “that will ultimately be our global headquarters.” He said Nashville is a longtime health care center and a “fabulous place to live” that Oracle employees love.

“It's at the center of the industry we're most concerned about, which is the health care industry,” Ellison said.

The announcement appeared to come spontaneously. “I shouldn’t have said that,” Ellison told Frist, a longtime health care industry veteran who represented Tennessee within the Senate. The couple spoke during a fireplace chat on the Oracle Health Summit in Nashville.

Shares of Oracle were largely unchanged in prolonged trading on Tuesday.

Oracle moved its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas in 2020. The company has made big strides in healthcare lately, most notably with its $28 billion acquisition of medical records software giant Cerner. Ellison said Tuesday that Oracle is comparatively latest to the healthcare sector, but he believes the corporate has a “moral obligation” to unravel the industry's problems.

Nashville has been a serious player in healthcare for many years and is now home to a vibrant network of healthcare systems, startups and investment firms. The city's fame as a health care center was strengthened when HCA Healthcare, certainly one of the primary for-profit hospital firms within the United States, was founded there in 1968.

HCA helped attract droves of healthcare professionals to Nashville, and other organizations quickly followed suit. Oracle has been developing its latest $1.2 billion campus in the town for about three years, Oracle said The Tennessean.

“Our people love it here and we believe it is the center of our future,” Ellison said.

Oracle didn’t immediately reply to CNBC's request for comment.