Lisa Su

Lisa Su (born 1969 in Tainan, Taiwan) earned her doctorate in electrical engineering at MIT and worked at IBM and Freescale before joining AMD, becoming CEO in 2014 when the company was widely considered dead money. Her decade-long turnaround — disciplined chip roadmaps, the Zen architecture, the Xilinx acquisition — made AMD the only serious rival to Nvidia in high-performance computing, and made Su one of the most respected engineers ever to run a major semiconductor firm.

Betting the company on AI compute

Su has called AI the biggest inflection point of her career and steered AMD’s roadmap around the Instinct GPU line to challenge Jensen Huang’s Nvidia in AI data centers. The bet paid its largest dividend in October 2025, when AMD and Sam Altman’s OpenAI announced a strategic partnership to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of Instinct GPUs over multiple years — a deal Su said could bring in tens of billions of dollars, structured with a warrant giving OpenAI rights to up to 160 million AMD shares as deployment milestones are hit. AMD stock jumped more than 20 percent on the news.

Skeptics flagged the deal’s circularity — the chipmaker effectively subsidizing its customer’s purchases with equity — as a symptom of AI-bubble financing. Su rejects the framing: at a Wired event in late 2025 she called bubble claims “somewhat overstated,” argued AI demand is on a ten-year growth arc, and said critics of massive AI capex are thinking too small. Under her, AMD has also positioned itself as the open-ecosystem alternative in AI hardware, pushing its ROCm software stack against Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA moat.