Lisa Su

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Lisa Su transformed AMD into a major competitor in AI computing.

© Caroline Brehman—AFP/Getty Images

When Lisa Su became chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in 2014, the semiconductor company was struggling to compete with industry leader Intel (INTC). AMD’s market share had declined, and its future was uncertain. Su, an electrical engineer who had spent much of her career developing semiconductor technology, believed AMD could regain its competitive edge by focusing on high-performance computing rather than entering the rapidly growing smartphone chip market.

The strategy helped transform AMD into a leading supplier of computer processors and positioned it to benefit from the growing demand for chips used in artificial intelligence. Under Su’s leadership, AMD also emerged as a challenger to NVIDIA (NVDA), whose graphics processing units (GPUs) came to dominate the market for AI computing.

Lisa Tzwu-Fang Su was born November 7, 1969, in T’ai-nan, Taiwan. When she was two or three years old, her family moved to New York City so her father could attend graduate school at Columbia University. He later worked as a statistician for the city government. Her mother, an accountant, eventually started a business connecting Taiwanese manufacturers with American companies.

Su grew up in Queens, where her parents placed a strong emphasis on education. Her father quizzed her on multiplication tables when she was five, and she studied piano for about 10 years. But Su was more interested in understanding how things worked. “I did a lot of engineering things, like taking apart my brother’s model car when I was 10,” she told The New York Times in 2017. She attended the Bronx High School of Science, graduating in 1986.

Su went on to study electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). During her freshman year, she took a part-time job in a semiconductor laboratory, helping a graduate student conduct experiments. The work sparked her interest in computer chips and ultimately shaped her career. She received a bachelor’s degree in 1990, a master’s degree in 1991, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1994. Her doctoral research focused on silicon-on-insulator technology, a method of improving semiconductor performance.

After completing her doctorate, Su joined Texas Instruments (TXN), a semiconductor company based in Dallas. She spent less than a year there before returning to New York, where her family was, and joining IBM (IBM).

During her 13 years at IBM, Su helped develop semiconductor technology, including copper interconnections used to improve the performance of computer chips. She also worked on microprocessor development and eventually became vice president of the company’s Semiconductor Research and Development Center. One of her most formative assignments was serving as technical assistant to IBM’s CEO, Lou Gerstner. The position gave her an opportunity to observe how a major technology company was managed, an experience she later described as one of the most influential of her career.

Su discovered that managing engineers offered opportunities beyond those available to an individual researcher. “As one person, as a researcher, you can get so much done,” she told an interviewer at Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2025. “But hey, if you have a little team of 10 people, you can actually get so much more done.”

Learning to manage people also presented challenges. Early in her management career, a supervisor encouraged her to pay greater attention to employees’ individual needs rather than focusing exclusively on their work. The experience helped shape her approach to leadership, which emphasized ambitious goals while recognizing that employees needed different kinds of guidance and support.

In 2007, Su left IBM to become chief technology officer at Freescale Semiconductor, her first executive position. While at Freescale, she oversaw research and development and later became senior vice president and general manager of the company’s networking and multimedia business, responsible for strategy, marketing, and engineering.

Su joined Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in January 2012 as senior vice president and general manager of its global business units. At the time, the company was struggling to compete with Intel (INTC), whose processors dominated the market for personal computers and servers. AMD had lost market share, its finances were deteriorating, and its future was uncertain. Some of Su’s colleagues and mentors questioned her decision to join the company. But Su saw an opportunity to help restore AMD’s position in the semiconductor industry.

Initially responsible for AMD’s global business units, Su became chief operating officer in 2014. Just six months later, the company’s board asked her to succeed CEO Rory Read. She accepted, becoming AMD’s first female CEO in October 2014. At the time, the company’s market capitalization had fallen below $3 billion, and its stock was trading at roughly $3 a share.

Su believed AMD’s recovery depended on developing better products rather than simply cutting costs. Although smartphone chips were a rapidly growing market, she concluded that AMD would be better off concentrating on high-performance computing, where its engineers had greater expertise. The decision required patience: Developing new processors could take three to five years, and the company would have to invest heavily before seeing results.

Under Su’s leadership, AMD concentrated on redesigning its central processing units (CPUs), the chips that carry out instructions in computers and servers. The effort led to the introduction of its Zen processor architecture in 2017, which became the foundation for the company’s Ryzen processors for personal computers and EPYC processors for servers. The new chips offered improved performance and helped AMD regain market share from Intel, particularly as demand for data center computing grew.

Su also emphasized deepening relationships with customers and improving AMD’s ability to deliver products on schedule. Her approach helped the company secure business with major technology companies, including Microsoft (MSFT), Meta Platforms (META), and Oracle (ORCL). As AMD’s products became more competitive, its revenue and market value increased substantially.

By 2022, AMD’s recovery had given Su an opportunity to make another major bet. That year, she became chair of AMD’s board of directors and proposed putting artificial intelligence at the center of the company’s strategy. With the board’s backing, AMD accelerated development of its Instinct line of GPUs, chips capable of performing the large number of calculations required to train and run AI models.

The strategy put AMD in more direct competition with NVIDIA (NVDA), which had come to dominate the market for AI chips. NVIDIA also had an important advantage in CUDA, its widely used software for programming its GPUs. AMD sought to compete with its Instinct processors and ROCm software, while emphasizing lower prices and giving customers an alternative to relying on a single supplier.

AMD introduced its MI300 series of AI processors in late 2023 and began winning business from major technology companies. In October 2025, OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, signed a multiyear agreement to deploy six gigawatts of AMD GPUs, beginning with the company’s MI450 series in the second half of 2026. The agreement represented AMD’s biggest move yet into a market still led by NVIDIA.

In September 2026, AMD’s market cap topped $1 trillion for the first time, compared with less than $3 billion when Su became CEO.

Su has described herself as a technology optimist, although she has also emphasized a pragmatic approach to innovation. Her interest in the potential for artificial intelligence to improve health care is partly personal. Su has said that watching her mother endure a serious illness, including 60 days in intensive care, convinced her that technology could help doctors make better use of medical information and improve patient care. “I do believe tech has the opportunity to change so much of how we experience life in a very, very positive way,” she told Wired in 2025.

As semiconductors became increasingly important to artificial intelligence and national security, Su also took on a larger role in the industry. In 2026, she became chair of the board of directors of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), which represents U.S. chipmakers and other semiconductor companies.

Su has received numerous honors for her work as an engineer and business executive. She became the first woman to receive the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal, the organization’s highest semiconductor honor, in 2021, and Time named her CEO of the Year in 2024. In October 2026, President Donald Trump presented Su with the National Medal of Science, one of the United States’ highest honors for achievement in science and technology, citing her contributions to semiconductor engineering, processor architecture, and high-performance computing.