Lisa Su took over AMD when it was fighting to survive. Now it competes for the AI data center

When Lisa Su became AMD’s chief executive in October 2014, the company was losing ground to Intel in its core markets and its stock would later trade below $2. A decade later, AMD competes at the top end of nearly every market it sells into.

Su is an engineer by training. Born in Taiwan and raised in the United States, she earned her bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate in electrical engineering at MIT. She worked at Texas Instruments and spent more than a decade at IBM in semiconductor research before serving as chief technology officer at Freescale. She joined AMD in 2012.

Fewer bets, made bigger

Su’s turnaround rested on focus. AMD concentrated on high-performance computing and spent years developing a new processor design, Zen, which reached the market in 2017 in Ryzen chips for PCs and EPYC chips for servers. It relied on outside manufacturers to build them on leading-edge processes.

In 2022 AMD completed its acquisition of Xilinx, a maker of programmable chips, and Su became chair of the board the same year. In 2023 AMD introduced its Instinct MI300 accelerators, aimed squarely at AI workloads in the data center.

Recognition

TIME named Su its CEO of the Year for 2024. She chairs the Semiconductor Industry Association in 2026, and MIT chose her to give its 2026 commencement address.

What to watch

AI accelerators are the next chapter. AMD is competing with Nvidia’s hardware and with the software ecosystem developers have built around it. Winning data center customers will depend as much on software and supply as on the chips themselves.

Company

AMD

Role

Chair & CEO

HQ

Santa Clara, California

Founded

1969

Section

Semiconductors

This profile draws on public reporting and company materials.

Sources: Wikipedia: Lisa Su · Semiconductor Industry Association: Dr. Lisa Su · Wikipedia: AMD

Photo: Andrew Lih (Fuzheado), CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons