Oracle names two new presidents in possible succession play
Oracle revealed two new presidents in company filings on Friday. The move could have broader succession implications for the cloud giant.
The company lists cloud boss Clay Magouyrk and head of industries Michael Sicilia each as "president," two Securities and Exchange Commission filings show. The forms don't explicitly mention a promotion, but the executives haven't been previously listed as "presidents," according to a person familiar with the matter.
The executives are considered part of a succession plan for the company co-founded by billionaire and former CEO Larry Ellison, the person familiar with the matter said. Ellison now serves as chief technology officer and executive chairman.
"Ellison isn't going anywhere at this time," another person familiar said.
The new titles for Magouyrk and Sicilia mimic a similar pattern that played out years ago before Ellison stepped down as chief executive.
Oracle has used the two-president structure three times throughout its history. The first time, it named now- Oracle CEO Safra Catz a president along with a previous executive, Charles Phillips Jr. Oracle replaced Phillips with the late Mark Hurd after Hurd left HP. They each had the title until both were promoted to co-CEOs in 2014 when Ellison stepped back. Hurd died in 2019, and while Ellison considered possible successors, he opted for Catz to remain the company's sole CEO.
Magouyrk is a former Amazon software development engineer who joined Oracle as an individual contributor in 2014. He quickly impressed Ellison and Catz with his ability to deliver results quickly, leading to his rapid ascent through the ranks to preside over Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. His leadership style has at times been controversial.
Sicilia is the executive vice president of Oracle Industries. He's the executive who has been leading Oracle's takeover of Cerner.
The executives will help lead Oracle as it gains traction in the cloud-computing market. Oracle shares hit a record high this week after beating analyst estimates and raising its revenue forecast.
Piper Sandler analysts wrote in a note after the earnings release that the company "has entered an entirely new wave of enterprise popularity that it has not seen since the Internet era in the late '90s."
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"Nothing's as good as fiber, because once you've got it in the ground,' Oughton said, 'it's these photons traveling in glass. So it's much lower power." Fiber-optic cables have extremely low operational emissions and can last for a long time, making them an obvious choice for reducing money and environmental costs in the long term. The Fiber Broadband Association commissioned a study examining the environmental benefits of using a fiber network. The study found that 'the carbon footprint of fiber broadband networks is lower than hybrid fiber coax [cable] networks on every sustainability metric,' including associated costs for materials and operational use. Additionally, even though the initial deployment of the fiber-optic network may disturb ecosystems or incrementally increase carbon emissions, the study also found that after six years of use, those emissions drop considerably and pay off over time. "When you put in fiber, you're putting in the critical infrastructure for the next century…' Gary Bolton, president of the Fiber Broadband Association, told me. 'This passive optical network will last a century.' Cable and DSL Getty Images Most households got online using cable and DSL legacy networks until the introduction of faster technologies like fiber. Both are associated with a much higher energy consumption rate than fiber, largely due to the use of copper wires. Cable internet relies on coaxial cables, typically made of solid or woven copper wire covered in sheathings and occasionally enriched with fiber. While cable internet is much faster and more reliable than DSL internet, the technology is still not as fast as fiber. Those cables simply don't have the same bandwidth capacity as fiber-optic cables and don't perform as well over distances, which equals higher attenuation or loss of signal strength. While fiber cables require splitters and amplifiers to transmit data over long distances, those splitters are not always powered. That's not the case with cable. "Those [cable] splitters have to be powered, and then the amplifiers for the coax to repeat the signal have to be powered," Bolton said. The FBA study found that fiber internet reduces power consumption and carbon emissions by 93% to 96% compared to two common types of cable internet (hybrid-fiber cables and DOCSIS 4.0). DSL, which stands for Digital Subscriber Line, is an even worse offender than cable and often can't deliver speeds higher than 50 to 100 megabits per second. 'Copper is pretty greenhouse gas emission intensive relative to fiber and relative to cable,' Rowsell said, echoing other industry experts. The slower speeds and energy inefficiencies have led a lot of subscribers to migrate from DSL to other technologies like satellite internet, if available. Plus, many ISPs are moving toward shutting down DSL services entirely. AT&T announced in December of 2024 that it planned to retire DSL completely, citing the technology as an 'energy hog' that is difficult to maintain. 5G internet Stefan Pinter 5G internet is an increasingly popular alternative to wired internet, and it's a technology that only continues to improve in efficiency. While 5G is a common alternative to fiber in remote or hard-to-reach places, 5G is associated with higher energy costs for the same amount of transmitted data. Since 5G relies on frequency bands instead of direct cable transmission, there's more network congestion and signal loss risk, especially over long distances. As a result, 5G requires more energy, and 5G towers often require diesel generators for backup energy supply. Oughton's paper, published in July 2025, highlights the high energy usage of 4G and 5G internet in developing Asia and notes that rural households use more energy overall than urban ones. "Whenever you look at these systems and we talk about increasing broadband capacity, whether it's of a satellite network or of a mobile network,' Oughton said, 'you're always increasing the energy and emissions when you increase that capacity." The spectral efficiency of 5G internet (or how much data we can reasonably transmit over those frequency bands) is a key consideration for its effectiveness and staying power. When the FCC opened up the 6GHz band in 2020 to be used in the latest Wi-Fi standards, it also presented an opportunity for mobile carriers to expand and improve their services, "Delivering the connectivity, of course, is absolutely important,' said Alex Roytblat, the vice president of regulatory affairs at the Wi-Fi Alliance. 'But then, distributing that connectivity is very much like plumbing. You can deliver lots of water, but if you only have a faucet that can trickle down, then you're not getting the benefit." For the Wi-Fi Alliance and ISPs using spectrum to deliver internet, making even more unlicensed spectrum available is an essential solution. Doing so might be the key to delivering 5G internet more efficiently and allowing Wi-Fi channels to operate without crowding. "If the spectrum auctions are delayed relative to international standards, you're four years behind being able to deploy connectivity and 5G connectivity in urban areas," said Rowsell. Satellite internetLike 5G internet, low Earth orbit satellites revolutionized internet accessibility in ways we're still trying to keep up with. The strength of satellite internet is its wide, encompassing coverage of multiple terrains. You don't need any cords, cables or established infrastructure to set up the internet: Just a clear view of the sky and a good place for your receiving satellite dish. Like all fixed wireless technology, satellites are subject to the whims of the weather and, in some cases, require clearing trees or structures for a good signal. But otherwise, it's relatively easy to set up anywhere you go, and Starlink's LEO satellites ensure that you get much faster speeds than what you'd get from legacy satellite providers, like Viasat and Hughesnet, which use higher-orbiting GEO satellites. But there is a catch to the technology: To transmit the strongest signal and offer the most connectivity, you need a lot of LEO satellites in the sky, and those satellites create a lot of emissions. 'Compared to terrestrial mobile broadband, LEO is approximately eight times higher per rural subscriber, or six times higher per remote subscriber, in the baseline emissions scenario,' Oughton and three professors wrote in a paper on LEO megaconstellations in May 2024. GEO satellites, which orbit 35,000 kilometers above the Earth's surface, are generally larger than LEO satellites and follow the same orbit of the Earth. LEO satellites, which are much closer to the Earth's surface, require more satellites for more coverage. 'The issue of GHG emissions has not been a concern for satellite broadband until the emergence of LEO systems,' wrote researchers from UNSW Sydney in a paper from 2020. LEO satellites also have much shorter lifespans than GEO satellites, meaning that a massive fleet of satellites is required to offer broad coverage, and that fleet has to be periodically replaced with new satellites. The rocket emissions for those satellites are incurred even if the satellites aren't used, Oughton told me. The rate of rocket launches has grown exponentially in recent years, with 2024 setting the mark for the highest number of attempted launches in a year at 259. Of those 259 launches, 134 belonged solely to SpaceX. In his in-depth article on the sustainability of Starlink satellites, my CNET colleague Joe Supan notes that recent samples of the stratosphere from 2023 already showed a changed composition due to rocket emissions. As Starlink and other competitors enter the LEO satellite broadband space, rocket launch emissions and pollution will only increase, posing a greater risk to our ozone. 'It looks like those LEO constellations are here to stay, whereas a few years ago, we were very much skeptical about whether they were going to,' Oughton told me, referring to the recent shift in BEAD funding toward a satellite-first approach. 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Not only are tremendous amounts of water required for cooling these data centers, but the greenhouse gases and pollutants emitted by AI data centers running at full tilt are much more significant than the emissions or pollutants associated with standard data centers. Berkeley Lab, which offers the most comprehensive and detailed glimpse into US data center usage, predicts that by 2028, hyperscale and colocation data centers will account for over 90% of server energy consumption, 'primarily driven by AI workloads.' "If you look at the general or regular cloud services or internet services, the power for each rack of the server is probably five kilowatts, or below 10 kilowatts,' said Shaolai Ren, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside. 'But a rack of AI servers could be anywhere between 20 to 30, and even 100 kilowatt power.' The high energy consumption is primarily due to the power required to generate data, not just retrieve it, like a standard data center server. 'To make sure the delay is small enough, they need to over-provision their servers,' Ren explained. Since AI servers run much hotter than a typical server, they require much more water for cooling. In 2023, Google's data centers consumed over 23 billion liters of freshwater for cooling its servers; for context, that's just one billion liters shy of PepsiCo.'s reported overall freshwater consumption for the same year. 'The total annual on-site water consumption by US data centers in 2028 could double or even quadruple the 2023 level, reaching approximately 150 to 280 billion liters and further stressing the water infrastructures,' the 2024 Berkeley Lab report stated. AI's environmental impact has been a topic of increasing concern for researchers like Ren and Mohammad Islam, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of Texas, Arlington, who co-authored a paper on 'making AI less thirsty.' 'GPT-3 needs to 'drink' (i.e., consume) a 500ml bottle of water for roughly 10 to 50 medium-length responses, depending on when and where it is deployed,' Ren and Islam's paper reports. For Ren and Islam, the 'when and where' is vital to understanding AI's growing environmental impact: Water and carbon footprints sometimes have an inverse relationship, and working toward sustainability requires a holistic understanding. "You could have a location that consumes a lot of water, but it has very clean energy,' Ren said. 'For example, let's say we build a data center in Arizona using nuclear power, then we have no carbon emissions, but we still need a lot of water." Water consumption impacts change with the time of day and the location of the data centers. Fortunately, both metrics are relatively straightforward to consider when building or running a data center. While it's unrealistic to move data centers after they're built, considering colder climates when creating a new data center is an easy way to reduce water cooling usage. To that point, tech companies are increasingly shifting toward opening data centers in colder climates, like Canada, North Dakota or Norway. "Data center workloads are very flexible,' Ren said. 'You can move the workflows to different places to capture more efficient locations or efficient hours." Air pollution is also a consideration in developing AI data centers, which Ren classifies as a 'hidden toll of AI' in his paper written with other researchers from UC Riverside and Caltech. 'The overall public health costs of US data centers could rival or even exceed those of on-road emissions of the largest US states, such as California,' the paper states. As noted in Ren and Islam's paper on AI's water consumption, air pollution is not an isolated issue. Particles emitted from one AI data center may immediately impact the surrounding population and nearby places where the pollutants travel. Elon Musk's construction of a data center in South Memphis is a strong example: The data center runs on methane gas and emits far more air pollutants than data centers using clean or even electrical energy. While Musk's Memphis data center may not consume much water, the emissions and air pollutants are a growing concern. Additionally, local regulators and civil rights officials have come forward, asserting that the data center doesn't have the proper Clean Air Act Permits. One step toward AI sustainability, according to researchers like Ren and Islam and industry-experts like Markus Kasanmascheff, who has been reporting on tech and Microsoft for over a decade, is transparency. "There's no discussion about this, because it's the shiny new thing, and it's cool, and it's evolving,' Kasanmascheff said. 'So people shy away from this, and the impact is very abstract." Looking ahead The internet and AI aren't going away anytime soon, and as we continue to bridge the broadband divide in the US and countries lacking access, millions more will get online in the coming years. Trying to understand our individual environmental impact in the face of much larger industry emissions and water usage, like the ones that shape the internet, may seem overwhelming. Those effects are primarily out of one's control, especially if you live in a rural area where you don't have access to fiber internet. There are solutions to making the internet more sustainable. Oughton and other researchers tout 'infrastructure sharing' and a 'multi-technology last-mile approach' as a means of making 5G towers more efficient in developing countries. Again, deploying internet technology is a potential solution for creating global, sustainable solutions to the industry's growing environmental impact. But that expansion will require, at the very least, more regulation and transparent reporting on emissions and water usage. "Regulation is not just a stick, it's a carrot,' Rowsell said, 'and it can encourage you to innovate in ways that match the regulation." Rowsell told me that regulation also needs to come with ways to minimize greenwashing. Carbon offsetting, for example, is often touted as a solution to high carbon emissions. So is water replenishment in water-scarce areas -- Meta, for instance, reports that it restored 1.5 billion gallons of water to high and medium water stress regions in 2024. While these efforts are a positive step in the right direction, they don't fully address the issue of carbon emissions and water consumption. 'They should actually focus more on finding ways to run their system better,' Islam said. "The number one [recommendation] is, again, be more transparent,' Islam told me. 'Large companies like OpenAI, Microsoft and Facebook should disclose their energy consumption in data centers and associated water consumption." In the meantime, understanding how the internet affects the environment is one step toward making better, conscious choices about the technologies we use every day.
