Dive Brief:
- Oracle elevated Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia to co-CEO roles in a C-suite reshuffle that moved former CEO Safra Catz to the board of directors, where she will serve as executive vice chair, according to a Monday announcement.
- Magouyrk — a founding member of Oracle's cloud engineering development center — joined the company from AWS and served as president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for nearly a dozen years. Sicilia came to Oracle when the company acquired Primavera Software in 2008 and rose in June to president of Oracle Industries, where integrating agentic AI into its industry application suites has been a priority, the company said in the announcement.
- The move shores up two pillars of the company’s business strategy, according to Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CTO, board chair and co-founder. “Clay's years of experience leading Oracle's large, fast-growing Cloud Infrastructure business has demonstrated his readiness for a CEO role,” Ellison said in the announcement. “Mike has spent the last several years modernizing Oracle’s Industry applications businesses — including Oracle Health — by completely rebuilding those applications using the latest AI technologies.”
Dive Insight:
The leadership change comes amid aggressive data center buildouts shepherded by Catz and Ellison as hyperscalers race to ease AI workload capacity constraints.
In June 2024, OpenAI supplemented its Azure deployments with Oracle infrastructure to train and host its large language models. Roughly a year later, Oracle deployed OpenAI’s GPT-5 across its database and software services application suites and leveraged OpenAI generative AI tools for its electronic health records business earlier this month.
The partnership has extended to capital investments, as well.
Oracle and OpenAI agreed to build 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity as part of the federally endorsed Stargate infrastructure push in July and inked a five-year deal for $300 billion in cloud services earlier this month.
Partnerships are just one of the levers Oracle is leaning on to build its cloud business.
The company added $10 billion to the $25 billion it had already committed to capital investments in the current fiscal year, which began June 1, Catz said during the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call, earlier this month.
“All this money we’re spending on training is going to have to be translated into products that are sold, which is all inferencing,” Ellison said during the call, adding that the market for inference will eventually overshadow the model-training market.
Catz has been central to Oracle’s cloud expansions since becoming the company’s sole CEO in 2014. In just the last year, Oracle has cemented multicloud pacts to house its database servers in AWS, Microsoft and Google facilities. The executive touted an inflection point in the company’s cloud expansion plans as the number of OCI regions surpassed 100 in March.
“Safra led Oracle as we became a hyperscale cloud powerhouse,” Ellison said in Monday's announcement.
The co-CEO arrangement aligns Oracle’s executive leadership with growth drivers, Gartner VP Analyst Balaji Abbabatulla told CIO Dive via email Monday.
“This change is an indication to investors, customers and business partners that Oracle is reinventing itself as an ecosystem-driven AI infrastructure provider, led by experts in cloud infrastructure and industry ecosystem partnerships,” Abbabatulla said. “This is Larry’s way of announcing the next generation of Oracle without taking anything away from Safra’s accomplishments.”
