Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said Tuesday that the company is moving its world headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, to be closer to a major health-care epicenter.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Bill Frist, a former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Ellison said Oracle is moving a “huge campus” to Nashville, “which will ultimately be our world headquarters.” He said Nashville is an established health center and a “fabulous place to live,” one that Oracle employees are excited about.

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

The announcement was seemingly spur-of-the-moment. “I shouldn’t have said that,” Ellison told Frist, a longtime health-care industry veteran who represented Tennessee in the Senate. The pair spoke during a fireside chat at the Oracle Health Summit in Nashville.

Shares of Oracle were mostly flat in extended trading Tuesday.

Oracle moved its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin, Texas, in 2020. The company has been making a major push into health care in recent years, most notably with its $28 billion acquisition of the medical records software giant Cerner. Ellison said Tuesday that Oracle is relatively new to the health-care sector, but he believes the company has a “moral obligation” to solve problems facing the industry.

Nashville has been a major player in the health-care scene for decades, and the city is now home to a vibrant network of health systems, startups and investment firms. The city’s reputation as a health-care hub was catalyzed when HCA Healthcare, one of the first for-profit hospital companies in the U.S., was founded there in 1968.

HCA helped attract troves of health-care professionals to Nashville, and other organizations quickly followed suit. Oracle has been developing its new $1.2 billion campus in the city for about three years, according to The Tennessean. 

“Our people love it here, and we think it’s the center of our future,” Ellison said.

Oracle did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

HashiCorp shares jumped almost 20% on Tuesday following a media report claiming IBM was in talks to acquire the cloud software maker.

Developers use HashiCorp’s software to set up and manage infrastructure in public clouds that companies such as Amazon and Microsoft operate. Organizations also pay HashiCorp for managing security credentials.

Citing unnamed sources, The Wall Street Journal said a deal could materialize in the next few days.

HashiCorp and IBM representatives both told CNBC they do not comment on market rumors or speculation.

Founded in 2012, HashiCorp went public on Nasdaq in 2021. The company generated a net loss of nearly $191 million on $583 million in revenue in the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, according to its annual report. In December, Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp, whose family name is reflected in the company name, announced that he was leaving.

Revenue jumped almost 23% during that period, compared with 2% for IBM in 2023. IBM executives pointed to a difficult economic climate during a conference call with analysts in January. The hardware, software and consulting provider reports earnings on Wednesday.

Cisco held $9 million in HashiCorp shares at the end of March, according to a regulatory filing. Cisco held early acquisition talks with HashiCorp, according to a 2019 report.

IBM shares slipped after publication of the Wall Street Journal article but quickly recovered, ending Tursday’s trading session flat.

Read the full Wall Street Journal report here.

Tesla is eliminating around 12% of its workforce at a factory in Austin, Texas, as part of a broader restructuring the company announced last week.

According to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act letter on Tuesday, the layoffs affect 2,688 employees at the facility in Travis County. In 2021, Tesla CEO Elon Musk moved the company’s corporate headquarters to Austin from Palo Alto, California.

Musk said in an internal memo last week that Tesla was cutting more than 10% of its global headcount as the electric vehicle maker reckons with flagging sales and increased competition. He didn’t say which departments or locations would be most impacted.

“As we prepare the company for our next phase of growth, it is extremely important to look at every aspect of the company for cost reductions and increasing productivity,” he wrote. A subsequent WARN notice filed in New York indicated that 285 of positions were being eliminated at a factory in Buffalo.

Tesla employed 140,473 people as of December, according to filings.

Tesla officially opened its Texas EV and battery factory in April 2022, with a “cyber rodeo” party. The company now manufactures some of its Model Y crossover utility vehicles in Austin, and has started to build its Cybertruck there.

Musk later called the Austin factory, and another assembly plant in Germany, “gigantic money furnaces,” in an interview with Tesla Owners Silicon Valley, a fan club that promotes Tesla vehicles.

According to filings with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation revealed, Tesla was planning to spend upward of $770 million last year on the construction of expanded facilities in Austin, including for battery cell testing and manufacturing, cathode and drive unit manufacturing, and a die shop, among other things.

Tuesday’s WARN filing said that “none of the employees are represented by a union and none of the employees have bumping rights,” or the right of more senior workers to replace those with less seniority.

Executives are expected to discuss the restructuring on the company’s quarterly earnings call at 5:30 p.m. ET.

WATCH: Tesla set to report earnings