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2Lisa Su, 2024 CEO of the Year
Dec 10, 2024, TIME
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Lisa Su apologizes if she seems tired. It’s the day after the U.S. presidential election, and like much of the nation she was awake until the early hours, transfixed as the results came in, only tearing herself away once it became clear that Donald Trump had won. “I wanted to know,” Su explains as she takes her place at the head of a conference table in the Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). “It’s relevant information.”
The identity of the next President is pertinent news to most of America’s CEOs, but few more so than the leader of a top semiconductor company. Semiconductors, or chips, are the engines of our computers, phones, cars, internet services, and—increasingly—our artificial intelligence (AI) programs. The relentless rise of the chip over the past seven decades has grown economies, transformed lives, and helped cement the U.S., where most chips get their start, as the globe’s postwar hegemon. AMD is one of the world’s leading designers of the CPU chips that power both personal computers and data centers, the vast warehouses of servers that make possible the likes of Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. It’s also a top designer of graphics processing units, or GPUs, the specialized chips used to create and run AI programs like ChatGPT. When you send an email, stream a movie, buy something online, or chat with an AI assistant, chances are an AMD chip is providing some of the computing power needed to make that happen. In November, a supercomputer that runs on AMD chips displaced another AMD-based machine to become the world’s most powerful,
Which is thanks in large part to Su’s leadership. When she became CEO a decade ago, AMD stock was languishing around $3, its share of the data-center chip market had fallen so far that executives rounded it down to zero, and the question on everybody’s lips was how long the company had left. An engineer by training, Su spearheaded a bottom-up redesign of AMD’s products, repaired relationships with customers, and rode the AI boom to new heights. In 2022 the company’s overall value surpassed its historical rival Intel’s for the first time. AMD stock now trades at around $140, a nearly 50-fold increase since Su took over. This fall, Harvard Business School began teaching Su’s stewardship of AMD as a case study. “It really is one of the great turnaround stories of modern American business history,” says Chris Miller, a historian of the semiconductor industry and the author of Chip War.
For all its progress, AMD remains the semiconductor industry’s distant No. 2. As Su’s team was speeding past Intel, both companies were lapped by Nvidia, run by Su’s cousin Jensen Huang, which in two years has risen from industry also-ran to become the most valuable company in the world. Nvidia got a jump on its rivals by realizing that its chips, initially made for rendering graphics, happened to be perfectly suited for training neural networks, the programs that underpin modern AI. Of the $32 billion worth of AI data-center GPUs sold in the third quarter of 2024, Nvidia’s accounted for some 95%. In November, AMD announced that it would lay off 4% of its global workforce in what it framed as a restructuring to focus on the opportunities from AI. Meanwhile, big tech customers, like Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon, are now designing their own specialized chips for AI workloads, which could reduce their reliance on AMD products. And AMD’s continued growth relies on a host of factors outside its control: continued progress in AI; the security of Taiwan, where the vast majority of its top chips are manufactured; and the actions of a notoriously unpredictable U.S. President. Trump’s return to the White House will bring new turbulence to an industry that has barely caught its breath from a half-decade of geopolitical showdowns, shortages, and an AI-fueled market boom.
A lot rides on Su’s ability to steer the company through these obstacles. People who know her describe Su as a shrewd strategist who invests in talented people and jettisons those who aren’t pulling their weight. “I don’t believe leaders are born. I believe leaders are trained,” she tells TIME, ahead of a strategy meeting where she delivers blunt feedback to her executives and urges them to move faster and delegate more. Su, 55, holds meetings on weekends and is known among her executives for wanting to talk on morning calls about the finer points of long documents that were circulated after midnight. When prototype chips get delivered from the factory, she often personally goes down to the lab to help scrutinize them. It’s a hard-charging style that isn’t for everyone and makes it difficult for people who don’t meet their commitments to survive at the company, according to Patrick Moorhead, a tech-industry analyst and a former AMD executive who left before she joined.
