A piece of advice if you’re meeting with Lisa Su: Wear sneakers.
Su, the leader of AMD, moves fast these days, though I suspect that’s always been the case. Her company's chips underpin the artificial intelligence that’s changing the world at breakneck speeds. To hear Su and literally everyone else in semiconductors talk about it, the US is in an AI race with China—and the rules keep changing. The Trump administration has once again shifted its stance on what kind of chips can and can’t be shipped to China, with the latest decree being that the US will take a 15 percent cut of AMD and Nvidia chip sales to China. Meanwhile, on the home front, Su has claimed that AMD’s newest AI chips can outperform Nvidia’s—part of her strategy to keep eroding Nvidia’s dominance in the market.
So, yeah: Be ready to keep up.
Under Lisa Su, the stalwart American semiconductor company has reasserted itself as a force in the age of AI. “Reasserted” doesn’t do it justice: Su took a struggling AMD and executed a 10-year turnaround that has been, as one economist put it, nothing short of remarkable. Since 2014, when Su took over as CEO, AMD’s market cap has risen from around $2 billion to nearly $300 billion.
Aside from her well-known bona fides, Su herself—what drives her, what inspires her, what irritates her, where her politics lie—is less known. This is what I was hoping to learn when I visited AMD’s offices and labs in the hills of Austin, Texas, on a day in late June when the wind seemed to do little more than push heat around.
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Our conversation kicked off with China, which accounts for nearly a quarter of AMD’s business. She betrayed no anxiety. Su now travels frequently to Washington, DC, to grease the wheels. “We’ve come to realize that export controls are a bit of a fact of life,” she told me, “just given how critical the chips that we make are.” In other words, it’s precisely because AMD’s chips are so darn important—to national security, to national economies—that they’re now at the heart of modern statecraft.
Another thing I learned about Su: She plays the long game. Politics is a cakewalk compared to what she’s managed to pull off professionally.
Su was born in Taiwan in 1969 and raised in Queens, New York. Her father worked for the city as a statistician; her mother was an accountant who became an entrepreneur in her mid-forties. Su earned a doctoral degree in electrical engineering from MIT, then went on to stints at Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor, where she served in executive roles. After joining AMD in 2012, she quickly rose to COO. As Su tells it, six months in, the chairman of the board called her and said, “It’s time, Lisa.” Su’s response: “Really? That seems kinda quick.”
As CEO, Su smartly steered AMD toward the high-performance computing market. She embraced chiplets, a modular approach to building chips that has paid off enormously. She impressed the industry by launching the world’s first 7-nanometer data center GPUs. More recently, she doubled AMD’s data center revenue in two years. And she has struck deals with juggernauts like OpenAI, Meta, Google, and a couple of Elon Musk’s companies. During a keynote speech at AMD’s annual event this June, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman trotted onto the stage to hug it out with Su.