Lisa Su apologizes if she seems weary. It’s the day after the U.S. presidential election, and like many Americans, she stayed up late, captivated by the incoming results. She only went to bed once it was clear that Donald Trump had won. “I wanted to know,” Su explains as she sits at the head of a conference table in the Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). “It’s important information.”
The identity of the next President is crucial for most of America’s CEOs, but it's particularly significant for the leader of a top semiconductor company. Semiconductors, or chips, power our computers, phones, cars, internet services, and increasingly, our artificial intelligence (AI) programs. The steady rise of the chip over the past seven decades has driven economic growth, transformed lives, and helped establish the U.S., where most chips are designed, as the globe’s postwar leader. AMD is one of the world’s top designers of the CPU chips that power both personal computers and data centers—the vast server warehouses that enable companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. It’s also a leading designer of graphics processing units (GPUs), the specialized chips used to create and run AI programs like ChatGPT. When you send an email, stream a movie, shop online, or chat with an AI assistant, there’s a good chance an AMD chip is providing some of the computing power needed. In November, a supercomputer running on AMD chips became the world’s most powerful.
Much of this success is due to Su’s leadership. When she became CEO a decade ago, AMD's stock was around $3, its share of the data-center chip market had dropped to almost zero, and the company's future was uncertain. An engineer by training, Su led a comprehensive redesign of AMD’s products, repaired relationships with customers, and capitalized on the AI boom. In 2022, AMD’s overall value surpassed its historical rival Intel’s for the first time. AMD stock now trades at around $140, nearly 50 times higher than when Su took over. This fall, Harvard Business School began teaching Su’s management 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.
Despite its progress, AMD remains the semiconductor industry’s distant second. As Su’s team was overtaking Intel, both companies were surpassed by Nvidia, led by Su’s cousin Jensen Huang. In just two years, Nvidia has risen from an industry underdog to become the world’s most valuable company. Nvidia gained an edge by realizing that its chips, initially designed for graphics, were perfectly suited for training neural networks, the foundation of modern AI. Of the $32 billion worth of AI data center GPUs sold in the third quarter of 2024, Nvidia accounted for about 95%. In November, AMD announced a 4% global workforce reduction, framing it as a restructuring to focus on AI opportunities. Meanwhile, major tech customers like Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are now designing their own specialized AI chips, which could reduce their reliance on AMD products. AMD’s continued growth depends on factors outside its control, including AI progress, Taiwan’s security, and the actions of an unpredictable U.S. President. Trump’s return to the White House will bring new challenges to an industry still recovering from years of geopolitical tensions, shortages, and an AI-driven market boom.
Su’s ability to navigate these challenges is crucial. Those who know her describe her as a strategic thinker who invests in talented people and moves on from those who don’t perform. “I don’t believe leaders are born. I believe leaders are trained,” she tells TIME, before a strategy meeting where she gives candid feedback to her executives and urges them to move faster and delegate more. Su, 55, holds meetings on weekends and is known for discussing detailed documents circulated late at night. When prototype chips arrive from the factory, she often goes to the lab to help examine them. This demanding style isn’t for everyone and makes it tough for those who don’t meet their goals to stay at the company, according to Patrick Moorhead, a tech-industry analyst and former AMD executive who left before she joined.
The potential for AI to transform science, healthcare, and the workplace depends on access to a diverse supply of chips. In the emerging cold war between the U.S. and China, semiconductors are among the most critical battlegrounds. America’s economic success—as measured by its stock market—depends more than ever on the continued growth of companies that design, produce, and utilize chips. Allies say Su is up to the task. “We couldn’t have a person better qualified for this job,” says Jerry Sanders, the company’s 88-year-old founder and first CEO. Does she have what it takes to surpass Nvidia one day? “Not a question in my mind,” he says.
In October 2014, Forrest Norrod was in his car at a McDonald’s drive-through when he received a call from Su. Norrod had just left his job as an executive at Dell and was planning to take some time off. Su wanted to pitch him on joining AMD, where she had just been appointed CEO. While Norrod waited for his Quarter Pounder with cheese, he listened to her vision for the struggling company. By the next day, he was at AMD’s Austin headquarters, considering the opportunity to lead its server business. Norrod had seen how the pace of innovation in the cloud chip industry had slowed once AMD allowed Intel to dominate the market, and he believed that customers were suffering as a result. He sensed that Su was a leader with a unique combination of traits: a technical background, business acumen, and people skills. He accepted the job.
Su was born in Taiwan and moved to the U.S. at age 3 when her family immigrated for her father’s graduate studies. She grew up in New York City and developed a love for STEM subjects at an early age, becoming fascinated by writing basic programs on her Commodore 64 computer. She fondly recalls a high school project where she simulated a hurricane in a box, complete with boiling water and windows to observe the storm. She chose to major in electrical engineering at MIT after determining it was the most challenging option and eventually earned her Ph.D. in the subject.
At MIT, Su first experienced a semiconductor lab and was captivated by the idea that such a tiny piece of hardware could hold so much mathematical power. She spent the early years of her career at Texas Instruments and IBM, two first-wave tech giants, where she learned about running a business and managing teams. “I was really lucky early in my career,” she says. “Every two years, I did something different.” She joined AMD as a VP in 2012 and became CEO in 2014. “I felt like I was in training for the opportunity to do something meaningful in the semiconductor industry,” she says. “And AMD was my shot.”
Su took over a company burdened with debt that had laid off 25% of its staff, sold and leased back its Austin office, and spun off its expensive chip factories. It was a time of change for the tech industry as a whole. Smartphones and tablets were on the rise, while consumer PCs, AMD’s main market, were in decline. “It didn’t look at the time that Lisa was really set up for success,” says Stacy Rasgon, a chip-industry analyst. “She was handed a tough situation.” Su’s turnaround plan had three parts: build great products, focus on customer relationships, and simplify the business. Some AMD board members wanted to shift toward making low-power processors for phones. Su rejected that approach. “We needed to bet on what we were good at,” she says.
What AMD was good at was building powerful processors. Su set a goal for her engineers: to build a new CPU chip that was 40% faster than the previous generation’s. She also started a team on an even more ambitious project: to explore how to develop a chip for the world’s first exascale supercomputer, a machine capable of performing 1 quintillion operations per second. The decisions reflected a core tenet of Su’s leadership philosophy. “People are really motivated by ambitious goals,” she says. “The previous strategy of just doing a little bit better here and there—that’s actually less motivational.”
The problem was that Su’s plans would take years to bear fruit. In the meantime, AMD was still struggling. “My job as a CEO was to give the engineers time to do the work,” Su says. She secured deals with console manufacturers that provided the revenue AMD needed to stay afloat. In 2016, she signed another with a consortium of Chinese companies, licensing some of AMD’s designs so they could make processors for the Chinese market. That deal brought in $293 million, though it would later cause issues for AMD.
By 2017, the company was on stronger financial footing, and the new flagship chip was finally ready. Engineers had redesigned the CPU from the ground up, using a new architecture called “chiplets.” Until then, the chip industry had mainly etched the different parts of a processor onto one piece of silicon. AMD’s innovation was to put different circuits onto individual pieces of silicon and then fuse them all together, making manufacturing more reliable and scalable. Engineers suggested calling the new chip “Zen,” because it was designed with a balance between energy efficiency and high performance. The name stuck.
Meanwhile, Intel, AMD’s main competitor, was beginning to struggle. Its new cloud processors were delayed. When AMD’s chips hit the market, they were the best available. With each new generation of Zen, AMD’s share of the cloud CPU market grew. Today, its share of that market is 34%. When AMD’s overall valuation surpassed Intel’s in 2022, “it felt fantastic,” Norrod says. “It’s something that I don’t think anybody in the industry would have believed was possible just a few years ago.”
One recent afternoon at AMD’s Santa Clara headquarters, Su was meeting with several senior executives in the CEO’s favorite corner conference room, where the offices of both Nvidia and Intel are visible through the glass. In the meeting, Su pressed her colleagues to meet engineering milestones for the specialized chips that AMD sells for use in AI data centers. “We cannot miss a beat,” Su told them. “We have negative slack. Whatever we do organizationally, we cannot slow down.”
AMD is facing geopolitical challenges that could reshape the semiconductor industry. Today’s chips have billions of transistors, tiny gates for managing electric current. Manufacturing them requires massive machines with hundreds of thousands of specialized parts, which use lasers and molten tin to create extreme ultraviolet light that ultimately etches designs onto thin wafers of silicon with atomic-level accuracy. A stray particle, a half-degree temperature fluctuation, or a nanometer-scale vibration could each threaten a batch of chips worth millions of dollars. The process is so complex, fragile, and expensive that only one company is currently able to manufacture at scale the most cutting-edge chips designed by the likes of AMD and Nvidia: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). While the industry’s most advanced chips may be conceived in Silicon Valley, their fabrication is almost entirely outsourced to just a handful of factories on the west coast of Taiwan.
About 80 miles across the Taiwan Strait lies China, which claims the self-governing island as its territory. Chinese President Xi Jinping has instructed his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, according to U.S. intelligence assessments made public last year. Xi has also set China on a path to reduce its technological dependence on the U.S. by producing powerful chips of its own. Without Taiwanese manufacturing, the semiconductor industry would be upended, and the world’s supply of advanced chips would plummet. If Beijing's effort to become a world-leading semiconductor producer is successful, it would position China's military and AI industry to match or surpass America’s, which many in Washington view as a national security threat.
In this context, Su’s 2016 decision to do business with Chinese state-backed companies looks like a misstep. Pentagon officials tried and failed to block the deal at the time, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, which cited concerns that AMD had transferred crucial know-how that could aid China’s military and domestic semiconductor ambitions. AMD denied suggestions that it had sought to evade regulatory scrutiny on the deal, saying that it had correctly briefed the Pentagon and other agencies and had received no objections and that the Journal’s story contained “several factual errors and omissions.” At the time, there were few laws against technology transfer to China, and deeper economic integration between the two powers was viewed by many as natural. “It was a very different era,” Su says. But the situation would quickly change. In 2019, the Trump Administration placed AMD’s Chinese joint venture on the “entity list” that restricts exports of critical technologies to foreign adversaries because of perceived security risks. In 2022, the Biden Administration passed broader export controls that made it illegal for companies like AMD and Nvidia to sell their most advanced chips to Chinese companies.
Demand for specialized AI chips is so high, and their supply so constrained, that these export controls have so far had little effect on chipmakers’ bottom lines. But Trump is expected to further expand tariffs and sanctions on China, which could quickly become painful for chip companies. About 15% of AMD’s revenue in 2023—$3.4 billion—came from the legal sale of less powerful chips to China and Hong Kong. AMD warned investors in October that its business could be adversely affected by tariffs, as well as any retaliatory measures imposed by foreign governments. If it’s any consolation for AMD’s market position, its rivals are even more exposed: in 2023, China and Hong Kong accounted for 17% of Nvidia’s revenue and 27% of Intel’s. “We want to service the entire world with our chips,” Su says. “[But] I’m certainly a believer in: we want to be the most advanced semiconductor country.”
Still, AMD is motivated to lobby against the widening of chip export controls, even if officials determine that more sanctions would be in the interests of national security. The Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade group of U.S. chip companies including AMD, argues against export controls and has spent more than $4.5 million since 2022 lobbying lawmakers in Washington, according to the watchdog OpenSecrets. “You have to run faster,” Su says of her view of the U.S.’s competition with China. She says her main goal with any lobbying is to help lawmakers ensure “that any desired policy has the desired effect,” adding, “We certainly want to be a good corporate citizen.”
Inside a high-security laboratory beyond the dry hills at Silicon Valley’s eastern edge, a team of government scientists celebrated a major milestone in November. The machine under their care, housed in a room longer than a football field, had just achieved the official title of the world’s most powerful supercomputer. If every single person on earth were to make one calculation per second, it would take them over 480 years to calculate what this supercomputer could do in one minute. The machine is called El Capitan, after the massive granite rock formation in Yosemite National Park. At its heart are more than 44,000 AMD chips called accelerated processing units (APUs), which combine elements of CPUs and GPUs in the same chip. When Su heard the news that El Capitan had officially become the world’s most powerful supercomputer, she was thrilled. “These are the days I live for,” she says. The achievement meant that the two most powerful supercomputers in the world are now powered by AMD chips.
For Su, the win was about more than just bragging rights. “I personally visited the labs several times,” she says. Fulfilling her pledge to create best-in-class technology became almost an obsession, just as delivering Zen chips on time to waiting customers had been years earlier. “She’s so, so customer-centric,” says Vamsi Boppana, AMD’s senior vice president for AI. “She absolutely wants to delight, and that has served the company so well.”
Su views supercomputing as the wellspring from which further AI profits will flow. The chips in El Capitan are “without a doubt, the most complex thing we’ve ever built,” she says. But they were not a single-purpose investment. The designs that AMD engineers used for El Capitan are already being incorporated into the specialized AI chips supplied to clients like Meta and Microsoft. The most advanced AMD chip currently on sale in the AI market called the Instinct MI300X, is the “first cousin” of the chips inside El Capitan, says Mark Papermaster, AMD’s chief technology officer. That’s thanks to their chipset-based designs, which make it relatively simple to switch in and out different components. “There is so much synergy between traditional high-performance supercomputing and AI,” Su says.
AMD always had a business in building GPUs for gaming, but after the release of ChatGPT in 2022, the company quickly developed a more powerful line aimed at the data center market. In the past year, AMD’s projected revenue from specialized AI chip sales has jumped from essentially $0 to $5 billion, which would account for roughly 5% of that market. (Nvidia maintains a dominant share of the rest.) This line of chips is now a popular choice for what’s known in the industry as AI “inference,” or the running of an already-formed AI system.
For years, the easiest way to increase AI performance was by simply training bigger models on more GPU chips. But as some computer scientists report diminishing returns from that practice, companies are now turning to a different strategy: increasing the time AIs spend running instead—in the inference phase, rather than the training phase. That could be good news for AMD, whose inference chips are approaching parity with Nvidia’s in terms of not only speed but also energy efficiency, which matters even more when you’re running an AI over a longer period. “We do see inference as a growing piece of the market,” says Boppana.
AMD is still struggling to break into the training phase of the market. That’s largely because Nvidia controls the world’s leading software for optimizing GPUs for that purpose—and it only works with Nvidia chips. The large number of developers who already use it gives Nvidia an ongoing advantage. AMD is building its own competing software, but it is “absolutely behind Nvidia’s,” says Moorhead, the former AMD executive. Su says AMD is catching up. That’s partly thanks to an informal alliance with tech companies, including Meta, that want to avoid handing Nvidia an outright monopoly. Meta is buying AMD chips, contributing to AMD’s code base, and using its software in its data centers. “It’s a very good symbiotic relationship,” says Moorhead. “Without AMD, Nvidia can double their prices.” Says Su: “Nobody wants to be locked into a proprietary ecosystem. Really our strategy is: let’s invest in an open ecosystem. And then may the best chip win.”
Yet in their bid to reduce their reliance on Nvidia, major AI companies have also begun to design some of their own chips in-house. That could threaten AMD in the long term. But Su doesn’t see it that way. “I actually see it as an opportunity,” she says. No company wants to replicate the AMD 6 billion pours into R&D annually, she argues. She sees instead a future where big tech companies continue to spend on AMD’s chips while also relying on their own chips for certain workloads. “There’s no one-size-fits-all in computing,” she says. “The broader the ecosystem, the bigger the party.”
If Su is right, the size of the party is going to keep on growing. She predicts the specialized AI chip market alone will grow to be worth $500 billion by 2028—more than the size of the entire semiconductor industry a decade ago. To be the No. 2 company in that market would still make AMD a behemoth. Sure, AMD won’t be overtaking Nvidia anytime soon. But Su measures her plans in decades. “When you invest in a new area, it is a five- to 10-year arc to really build out all of the various pieces,” she says. “The thing about our business is, everything takes time.”