The Oracle headquarters in Austin, Texas, on April 24, 2024.
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Oracle is promoting its presidents of cloud infrastructure, Clay Magouyrk, and industries, Mike Sicilia, to co-CEOs, the company announced Monday.
Safra Catz, the software giant’s current CEO, will serve as executive vice chair on the company board.
Larry Ellison will remain Oracle’s board chairman and chief technology officer. He has been active outside the company, helping to finance Skydance Media’s merger in August with CBS News’ parent company, Paramount Global. The combined company, run by Ellison’s son, David, is now exploring an acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, CNBC reported earlier this month.
Oracle has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the artificial intelligence boom thanks to its cloud infrastructure business and its access to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are both needed to run large workloads. Oracle and other major cloud providers like Microsoft, Amazon and Google are in a fierce competition for customers.
As Oracle’s cloud infrastructure president, Magouyrk led the development of its Gen2 platform. Sicilia oversaw Oracle’s applications for vertical businesses, from banking to retail.
“A few years ago, Clay and Mike committed Oracle’s Infrastructure and Applications businesses to AI—it’s paying off,” Oracle founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison said in a statement.
Shares of the company rose 3% on Monday morning.
Oracle’s stock has surged 30% in the past month after its first-quarter earnings report projected massive cloud growth from the AI boom. Shares are up about 85% for the year.
The company said that its remaining performance obligations, a measure of contracted revenue that has not yet been recognized, soared to $455 billion, up 359% from a year earlier. The company also reaffirmed its financial guidance on Monday.
“At this time of strength is the right moment to pass the CEO role to the next generation of capable executives,” Catz said in a statement.
For decades, Oracle grew by selling licenses to database software that stores and serve up data for a variety of processes inside companies. The company also fielded applications and middleware. In the early 2010s, with Amazon gaining a foothold in information technology with its cloud-based services for computing, storage and databases, Oracle set out to build its own cloud. It wasn’t immediately popular, prompting the company to bring out a second generation of infrastructure in 2018.
Oracle’s cloud picked up business from young technology companies TikTok and Zoom. The real momentum came after OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, as Oracle sought to rent out Nvidia graphics chips for training and running AI models. It won business from cloud competitor Microsoft. More recently Oracle picked up a $300 billion contract from OpenAI over five years, starting in 2027.
On Monday, Oracle hinted at its corporate transformation toward AI-led cloud infrastructure, calling its webcast to announce the executive transition “AI Changes Everything.”
Clay Magouyrk, senior vice president of engineering for cloud infrastructure at Oracle Corp., stands for a photograph at an Oracle office in Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Thursday, July 19, 2018.
Chona Kasinger | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Catz was named co-CEO of Oracle in 2014 alongside Mark Hurd after Ellison stepped down from the role. Hurd died in 2019, and Catz continued to lead the company as its sole CEO. Catz joined Oracle in 1999 after 13 years of investment banking at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, and in 2005 she became Oracle’s finance chief.
Catz departs her role after selling over $2.5 billion in stock in 2025, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. She was also one of just 55 women to lead a Fortune 500 company.
Oracle is also involved in the Trump administration’s ongoing negotiations around social media platform TikTok, as CNBC has previously reported.
TikTok’s future in the U.S. has been uncertain since 2024, when Congress passed a bill that would ban the platform unless its Chinese parent company ByteDance divested from U.S. operations.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Saturday said Oracle will be responsible for maintaining TikTok’s data and privacy in the U.S. The platform will be owned by an investor consortium that includes Oracle and Silver Lake, and Oracle will keep its cloud deal with the platform, sources told CNBC’s David Faber earlier this month.
Oracle also said it was promoting two other executives. Mark Hura, executive vice president of North America sales, will become president of global field operations, and Doug Kehring, executive vice president of operations, will assume the role of principal financial officer.
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