Oracle taps industrial exec as its new CFO

She’s certainly got fresh energy.

On Monday, Oracle named Hilary Maxson its new CFO, as the tech company forges ahead with AI infrastructure spending.

Maxson’s appointment is effective immediately, the company said. She will report to Clay Magouyrk, one of Oracle’s two CEOs.

Most recently, Maxson served as EVP and group CFO at Schneider Electric, an energy and automation ​company with more than $45 billion in annual revenue in 2025. According to Oracle’s statement announcing the appointment, since Maxson joined Schneider in 2017, “the organization has transformed from an electrical equipment supplier into a digital energy technology partner for key segments, like utilities and datacenters.”

Before Schneider Electric, Maxson spent over a decade at AES, a Fortune 500 energy company, “where she held senior leadership roles across finance, strategy, and M&A, supporting complex, capital-intensive infrastructure investments across global markets,” Oracle said.

It’s an interesting time to appoint an industrial vet to the top finance seat at Oracle.

In recent years, the software behemoth has focused its efforts on meeting “customer demand for cloud infrastructure,” which currently “exceeds supply,” as the company noted in its statement.

But Oracle’s spending on data center expansion efforts is also creating a cash crunch: Bloomberg cites Wall Street projections that “the company will be free cash flow negative through 2030 due to the massive scale of data center development.” Oracle has said it will raise up to $50 billion in debt and equity this year.

The company’s restructuring efforts have also led to mass layoffs. In late March, the company started informing employees that Oracle would be cutting thousands of jobs, per CNBC.

“The choice of an industrial company CFO highlights the importance of the buildup of AI infrastructure within Oracle, and signals that growth lies in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure segment, not databases or applications,” Anurag Rana, a Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, wrote in a note on Monday.