By Foo Yun Chee
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – U.S. business software maker Oracle Corp is set to gain unconditional EU antitrust clearance for its $28.3 billion acquisition of U.S. healthcare IT company Cerner Corp, three people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday.
Oracle announced the deal, its biggest ever, in December last year. It will give it access to a trove of data and could attract more healthcare clients to its cloud platform.
Cerner’s data can help Oracle train and improve the software maker’s artificial intelligence-based cloud services. The company, whose software traditionally ran in its customers’ data centers, has started shifting its service to cloud computing providers.
The European Commission, which is scheduled to decide on the deal by June 1, and Oracle declined to comment.
Tech giants such as Microsoft Corp. have ramped up investments in the healthcare sector, spurred by demand for cloud-based solutions during the pandemic.
(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee; editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Mark Porter)
