LISA SU

Lisa Su became CEO of AMD in October 2014 when the company was in dire straits — the stock was trading around $2, the company was bleeding cash, and Intel dominated the CPU market. Su, an MIT-trained electrical engineer who joined AMD in 2012, bet everything on a new chip architecture called Zen.

When the Ryzen CPUs launched in 2017, they were competitive with Intel for the first time in a decade — and cheaper. AMD began taking market share in PCs, servers, and data centers.

The stock went from roughly $2 to over $450, and the market cap grew from about $2 billion to more than $750 billion under her leadership. She then positioned AMD for the AI era by acquiring Xilinx for $49 billion, developing the Instinct MI300 series of AI accelerators, and signing a multi-gigawatt compute partnership with OpenAI in 2025.

She became chair of AMD's board in 2022. Su has won virtually every award in the semiconductor industry and was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time.

AMD (CEO since 2014, board chair since 2022, market cap above $750 billion), Xilinx acquisition ($49B, closed 2022), Zen architecture pioneer, Instinct MI300 AI accelerators, and the 2025 multi-gigawatt compute partnership with OpenAI.

Su is not a personal investor in the traditional sense — her wealth is primarily AMD stock and compensation. Her "investing" is strategic: she decides where AMD allocates its R&D budget, which is effectively a multi-billion-dollar investment portfolio in semiconductor technology.

Her bets on Zen CPUs, EPYC server chips, and MI300 AI accelerators have been the investment decisions that matter. She favors long-term R&D bets over short-term financial engineering.

The AMD turnaround. Taking a $2 stock past $450 is one of the great shareholder returns of the era.

The Zen architecture restored AMD's competitiveness, the EPYC server chips cracked the data center market that Intel had monopolized for decades, and the Xilinx acquisition plus the MI300 accelerators positioned AMD for the AI build-out.

AMD's AI accelerators, while impressive, have not caught NVIDIA in the data center AI training market. Su has been transparent that closing the gap with NVIDIA's CUDA software ecosystem is AMD's hardest problem — the silicon is competitive, the developer stack is the moat.

Some critics also felt the Xilinx acquisition price was too high.

Execution wins. Su believes that in semiconductors, having a better product is the only strategy that works long-term.

No amount of marketing or financial engineering can compensate for a chip that does not perform. She runs AMD with an engineering-first culture.

Married to Daniel Lin. Born in Tainan, Taiwan in 1969 and moved to New York at age three.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is her first cousin once removed — Huang's mother is a sister of Su's grandfather. They did not grow up together and did not meet until both were well into their careers.

Extremely private personal life.

MIT (BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering).

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