Just two years after joining chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices in 2012, IBM veteran Lisa Su was tapped to take the top job. It was a big promotion for the then 43-year-old, but also a gamble. At the time, the company was floundering. It 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.”
On her second day as CEO, Su stepped up to the microphone during an all-hands call with a message for AMD’s demoralized employees: “I believe that we can build the best,” she told her staff.
That message was also step one in her three-pronged plan to fix AMD: Create great products, deepen customer trust and simplify the company. “Three things, just to keep it simple,” she told Forbes in May as part of an in-depth interview. “Because if it’s five or ten, it’s hard.”
Su, who first fell in love with semiconductors while at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, refocused her engineers on building Intel-beating chips. It took a while, but the Taiwan-born engineer’s bet eventually paid off. In less than a decade, she turned the struggling company into a darling of the chip industry–and a $271 billion (market capitalization) enterprise.
Now, the tech-stock rally of 2024 has made Su–the first female chief executive of a major semiconductor company– a new billionaire. She owns some 4 million shares–a tiny 0.2% sliver of the company–but those, along with options she’s been awarded, account for about three-quarters of her $1.1 billion fortune. The remainder comes from the nearly $400 million worth of AMD shares she’s sold since 2016, before taxes. When Forbes featured Su on the cover in May last year, she was worth $740 million. AMD’s shares have soared by more than 75% since then and by more than a fourth since the start of the year.
That makes Su, now 54, one of just 26 self-made U.S. women billionaires, a group that includes former talk show host and media entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey, Arista Networks CEO Jayshree Ullal and former Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. And she’s one of just 26 “hired hand” U.S. billionaires, including Ullal and Sandberg.
Su immigrated to New York City from Tainan, Taiwan when she was 3 with her mathematician father and her mother, a bookkeeper turned entrepreneur who launched an industrial supplies wholesaler. “I would say I’m a New Yorker at heart,” Su told an interviewer in 2020, adding that she was always somewhat involved in math and science. She chose to study electrical engineering at MIT because it seemed to be the hardest major, and while there picked up three degrees in the subject: a bachelor’s, master’s and a Ph.D.
It was during her freshman year at MIT that she first began doing research in a semiconductor lab. “I was actually making small devices and it was amazing to me that you could actually do that. Since then, semiconductors have been my passion,” she said in the 2020 interview.
Before joining AMD as a senior vice president and general manager for the company’s global business, she worked at IBM for 13 years in various engineering roles – including as IBM’s then- CEO Lou Gerstner’s technical assistant – and then moved to Freescale Semiconductor in Austin, Texas, taking on multiple leadership positions including chief technology officer. She still lives in Austin, with her husband Daniel Lin, even though AMD is headquartered in Santa Clara, California.
Su has posited that success is tied to knowing where you excel. Back in 2020 she said, “What we’re really good at is high-performance computing. We’re really good at putting an incredible amount of computing horsepower in people’s hands… It actually takes many years to build that foundation, but we took the time to build [it].”
A technically savvy researcher, she focused on developing chips with the highest-performance processors on the market – ones that could beat out its competitors in multiple criteria. Under Su’s guidance, AMD engineers took three years of tinkering to create the superfast Zen chip architecture, which it launched in 2017.
By 2020, that chip design was a market leader in terms of speed, and new business followed. AMD has since partnered with NASA, Microsoft, Meta, Lenovo, Oracle and Dell Technologies, turning a stock hovering below $3 per share when she became CEO to a recent $177 a share. Amid the stock surge, AMD’s market capitalization (though not its revenues) overtook that of its longtime rival Intel.
Last February, when AMD’s market cap first surpassed Intel’s, AMD cofounder Jerry Sanders was ecstatic. “I called everybody I know!” he said. “I was delirious. I’m only sorry that Andy Grove isn’t around so I could say ‘gotcha!’ ” (Grove, Intel’s legendary former CEO, died in 2016.) AMD has now eclipsed Intel’s market cap by $90 billion.
The far bigger competitor, though, is Nvidia–which has significantly greater revenue than AMD and a $1.6 trillion market cap, more than five times that of AMD’s. “Being a very capable second place of a two-horse race is a pretty good place to be,” says TD Cowen analyst Matt Ramsay.
But the go-go growth has slowed a bit. Last week AMD reported that revenue fell 4% to $22.7 billion in 2023, while net income tumbled 35% from the prior year to $854 million. The reason: sales of chips used for video games declined, and were only partially offset by higher revenue from chips for data centers.
There is still plenty of opportunity for growth, primarily thanks to the enthusiasm around AI. In December Su unveiled a new line of chips for use in generative AI. The company forecasts an industry-wide $77 billion market for AI chips this year, growing 70% annually through 2027. Su hopes to get a cut of Nvidia’s dominant share of the AI semiconductor market using its new series of MI300 chips – including one geared toward generative AI, with Microsoft as its marquee customer, and another powering supercomputers like Hewlett Packard’s El Capitan.
As Su told Forbes in May, “If you look out five years, you will see AI in every single product at AMD, and it will be the largest growth driver.”