Lisa Su

CEO — AMD

Profile

Lisa Su took over AMD in October 2014 when the company was circling the drain — trading at a few dollars a share, locked out of the premium server market by Intel, and widely considered uninvestable. Ten years later, AMD is a $300 billion company with a real product line competing head-to-head with Nvidia in the most important hardware market on the planet. That is one of the great corporate turnarounds in tech history, and she ran it.

Before AMD she spent 13 years at IBM, where she helped push the industry from aluminum to copper interconnects — the kind of fundamental process-level work that most CEOs have never touched. Three degrees in electrical engineering from MIT, a stint at Texas Instruments, then Freescale, then the top job at a chip-maker that was running out of runway. She bet the company on a new CPU architecture called Zen and a long march into the data center. Both worked.

For AI developers, what matters now is the Instinct line. The MI300X gave AMD a credible first foothold against Nvidia’s H100. The MI350 tightened the gap. The MI450, ramping through 2026, is the first product designed rack-scale from the ground up — enabled by AMD’s acquisition of ZT Systems. Meta committed to deploying 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPUs across multiple generations, and OpenAI signed on for large multi-year capacity. That is the moment AMD stopped being the alternative-in-theory and became the alternative-in-practice.

Su has been clear about the strategy: open software via ROCm, rack-scale systems to compete with NVL72-class offerings, and a relentless annual product cadence. ROCm is still behind CUDA — nobody credible pretends otherwise — but the gap is closing, and the fact that any challenger exists at all is a function of how hard she has pushed. Jensen Huang is a distant cousin. The AI chip wars are, improbably, a family affair.