This CEO Made AMD Billions – Now She Wants To Dominate The Market With AI

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112,801 views May 31, 2023

From a conference room atop AMD’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California, a stretch of highway 101 running outside, Lisa Su presides over a company older than the term "Silicon Valley." Down the road is a link to the company’s past, an old foundry in Sunnyvale where AMD used to press its chips. But from her window she can see a recent milestone in the company’s fast-evolving present: the offices of arch-nemesis Intel, whose market capitalization ($120.3 billion) AMD’s now eclipses ($153.5 billion). It wasn’t always this way. In 2014, when Su, now 53, took up the CEO reins at AMD (Advanced Micro Devices), the chipmaker was foundering. The company had laid off around a quarter of its staff and its share price hovered around $2. Patrick Moorhead, a former AMD exec, remembers it as “deader than dead.” Then Intel began to stumble, dragged down by manufacturing delays and Apple’s decision not to use its chips in iPhones. Nimble, with a tactician’s eye, Su was able to capitalize on her rival’s missteps, inking deals with laptop makers such as Lenovo and gaming giant Sony, plus Google and Amazon, whose massive data centers generated $6 billion of the chipmaker’s sales last year. At $63 billion, Intel’s annual revenue still dwarfs AMD’s $23.6 billion. But wresting away coveted server chip market share from its Silicon Valley neighbor, as well as scooping up the semiconductor company Xilinx, has spiked AMD’s stock nearly 30-fold in the nine years since Su took over. Now, with the mainstreaming of artificial intelligence stoking demand for the silicon brains behind machine learning, she’s facing a legacy-defining opportunity and a daunting challenge: Can AMD produce a chip powerful enough to break Nvidia’s near-monopoly on the processors that undergird the coming wave of generative AI technology? “If you look out five years,” she says, “you will see AI in every single product at AMD, and it will be the largest growth driver.” Su has been overclocking AMD for the last nine years, much like a gamer who pushes a processor to perform beyond its manufacturer-specified limits. Unlike many tech executives, she’s a world-class researcher, with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT. Her unique combination of technical genius, people skills and business savvy has made her among the highest-paid S&P 500 CEOs for the last several years (total 2022 compensation: $30.2 million). Overall, she has amassed a $740 million fortune (largely in AMD stock), landing her in 34th place on our annual ranking of America’s richest businesswomen. “Talk about leaning in and just killing it,” marvels Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer, who first met Su in 2014 as she began AMD’s turnaround.