Lisa Su

In October 2014, Lisa Su walked into AMD's headquarters in Sunnyvale as its new president and CEO. The company she inherited was worth roughly $3 billion, carried serious debt, and was losing market share to Intel in processors and Nvidia in graphics.¹ Its stock had sunk below $2 a share.² Inside AMD, people knew what the numbers meant: the company had been profitable only once in the previous five years³. Su had been there two years already, long enough to see exactly what was broken. Now it was hers to fix — or not.

Su grew up in Queens, New York, after immigrating from Tainan, Taiwan, at age three. At ten, she was taking apart her brother's remote-controlled cars and putting them back together, not because anyone asked her to, but because she needed to know how they worked. She later recalled: "I just had a great curiosity about how things worked."⁴ After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 1986⁵, she enrolled at MIT, chose electrical engineering because it seemed like the hardest major available⁶, and never really left — she earned her bachelor's, master's, and doctorate there, finishing her PhD in the early 1990s. In her first year, she made test silicon wafers for graduate students. Summer jobs at Analog Devices deepened the obsession with semiconductors⁷ that would define the next three decades.

In 1995, Su joined IBM as a research staff member specializing in device physics. Over the next several years, she played a critical role in developing the recipe to make copper connections work with semiconductor chips instead of aluminum, solving the problem of preventing copper impurities from contaminating the devices during production⁴. The copper technology launched in 1998, resulting in chips that were up to 20% faster than conventional versions and setting a new industry standard.⁴ That work got her noticed inside IBM, and in 2000, she was assigned for a year as technical assistant to CEO Lou Gerstner⁴ — one of the most formative experiences of her career, by her own account. When the year ended, she founded IBM's Emerging Products division, essentially running an internal startup. Through that division, she represented IBM in a collaboration with Sony and Toshiba to build next-generation game chips; Su's team came up with the idea for a nine-processor design that became the Cell microprocessor powering the PlayStation 3⁴. The lesson she took from that project — that programmability matters as much as raw performance, that hardware without accessible software fails in the market — would resurface years later at AMD.

On October 8, 2014, AMD announced Su as president and CEO.⁴ She had been watching the company struggle and had formed a clear diagnosis: AMD had spread itself too thin and was chasing markets it couldn't win. Her stated plan was blunt — focus on the right technology investments, simplify the product line, and push hard into gaming, data centers, and high-performance computing. When she joined in 2012, roughly 10 percent of AMD's sales came from non-PC products; by early 2015, that figure had risen to about 40 percent⁴, partly through deals placing AMD chips inside Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4⁴. But the deeper bet was on a new CPU architecture called Zen, which required a full clean-sheet redesign and wouldn't pay off for years. The Ryzen processors built on Zen launched in 2017, directly challenging Intel's dominance in both consumer desktops and server markets.⁸ AMD's market share rose sharply. Within a decade of Su taking over, AMD's market capitalization had grown from roughly $3 billion to more than $700 billion, and the company had overtaken Intel in market capitalization for the first time.⁴

By 2024, AMD's annual revenues had reached $25.8 billion — up 370% from when Su became CEO⁶ — and Time named her its CEO of the Year for a second time, making her the first woman to receive the distinction in either year it was awarded.⁴ In 2021, she had become the first woman to receive the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal.⁴ MIT named a new nanotechnology research building after her in 2022.⁴ Su told Forbes of her early engineering career: "I would walk into rooms where there were, like, 25 people, and I might have been the only woman."⁹ The number that perhaps best captures the arc is this: a $10,000 investment in AMD when Su became CEO would have been worth around $460,000 by late 2024.¹ When Time named her one of the "Architects of AI" for its 2025 Person of the Year issue⁴, AMD's Instinct GPU line was competing directly against Nvidia for the data center contracts that will determine what the next decade of computing runs on — and Lisa Su, who started by fixing her brother's toy cars in Queens, was in the room where those decisions get made.