This week Oracle announced the hiring of a new chief financial officer, Hilary Maxson. This wouldn’t be that notable were it not for the dramatic transition happening at Oracle as it adds a rapidly growing cloud computing unit to its software offerings. Maxson was brought in to manage Oracle’s accelerating fundraising and spending for artificial intelligence.
Maxson isn’t the usual candidate for the CFO of a software and cloud services company like Oracle. She comes from Schneider Electric, a manufacturer of industrial electrical equipment, including for power plants and data centers. Before that, she was with AES, a power generator. In the company’s press release announcing the hire, Oracle co-CEO Clay Magouyrk said that she was being brought in for her “experience scaling capital intensive global organizations.”
“Hilary’s experience spans industrial, infrastructure, and software businesses—sectors where capital intensity and execution excellence are critical to success,” Magouyrk said. Her hiring emphasizes how important acquiring power, land, and buildings for AI data centers have become, and how crucial financing is now.
Safra Catz was CFO and had remained Oracle’s principal financial officer even after she was elevated to co-CEO in 2014. Last year she left both posts to become executive vice chairman of the board, and executive vice president Doug Kehring had filled the finance role until Maxson’s hire.
Magouyrk mentioned “capital intensity” twice in his statement because in 2026 that is the name of the game at Oracle. Fueled by artificial-intelligence demand and a $553 billion multiyear backlog, Oracle is rapidly building AI data centers in its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure unit that rents out servers over the internet. In the past 12 months, Oracle has spent $48 billion on capital expenditures and has told investors to expect $50 billion in 2026.
While Oracle still has substantial operational cash flow, it’s being swallowed up by all the capex. Oracle has had to dip into financing markets, including a $25 billion February debt sale that followed an $18 billion in September offerings. At $135 billion, Oracle’s debt load has risen $42 billion in just nine months. Oracle also sold convertible preferred stock in February, and has registered to sell equity shares.
Maxson’s hire echoes one at Meta earlier in the year. Meta may spend up to $135 billion on capex this year, and the company hired a banker with extensive international experience, Dina Powell McCormack, as its president. Both she and Maxson are being brought in at a time when financing has become as important as operations for these two companies, something that hasn’t been true of either for decades.
For Oracle, operations are also being disrupted by AI. There have been widespread reports of up to 30,000 layoffs at Oracle beginning at the end of March. Some of Oracle’s 2026 capex is going to come from payroll savings, and the company is, in effect, trading people for computers.
This will be the first major test case of how well AI can improve productivity at this relatively early stage. Can Oracle continue its accelerating growth, even as it lays off anywhere from 10% to 25% of its workforce? If it can, a lot more tech layoffs may follow.
Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com