AMD CEO Lisa Su turned a struggling chipmaker valued at less than $2 billion into a major rival to Nvidia and Intel. AMD shares rose 5% on Thursday, putting the company’s market value above $950 billion by the close. Nvidia’s announcement that CEO Jensen Huang would step down has also renewed discussion of Su as a possible successor.
From MIT researcher to semiconductor executive
Born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1969, Su moved to the United States with her family at about age three and grew up in Queens, New York. As a child, she liked taking apart and rebuilding remote-control cars and other devices. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 1986, she studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees during the 1990s. Her PhD research focused on MOSFETs, the microscopic electronic switches used in chips.
After leaving academia, Su held engineering, research and management roles at Texas Instruments, IBM and Freescale Semiconductor. At IBM, she led the semiconductor research and development centre and worked on replacing aluminium interconnects with copper in chips. As a senior vice president and general manager at Freescale, she gained experience in corporate management and preparing a company for a public listing.
AMD shifts its focus to high-performance chips
Su joined AMD in 2012 to lead its global business units. The company was then valued at less than $2 billion and relied heavily on PC chips, even as the personal-computer market contracted. AMD moved towards a semi-custom chip strategy, tailoring designs to customers’ needs. It won chip design and supply contracts for Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One, reducing its reliance on the traditional PC market. In October 2014, Su became AMD’s president and CEO.
She then pulled AMD back from lower-margin, low-power chip businesses and concentrated resources on cloud computing, data centres and game consoles. Ryzen processors helped the company regain ground in consumer PCs, while EPYC processors expanded its presence in servers and data centres. Cloud providers including Amazon, Microsoft and Google Cloud have used the EPYC line.
In 2018, AMD launched the 7-nanometre Radeon Instinct MI50 and MI60 data-centre GPUs. By 2020, its market value had topped $110 billion.
AMD still trails Nvidia in the AI race
AMD’s business has grown more than 100-fold, but it remains far smaller than Nvidia, whose market value is close to $4 trillion. Su has said she does not want AMD judged only against Nvidia or Intel, arguing that the overall market remains large.
In 2025, SemiAnalysis analysts said AMD’s GPU software ecosystem was limiting how much customers could get from its hardware. Su later spoke with the firm’s chief analyst for about 90 minutes. In a post on X, she said criticism could be helpful and acknowledged that AMD still needed to improve customer and workload optimisation and broaden software support.
The competitive landscape is also shifting. Intel and Nvidia announced plans to work together on AI infrastructure and personal-computing products, raising concerns that the two companies could combine their strengths to put more pressure on AMD. At the same time, AMD reached a multiyear agreement with OpenAI to supply a total of 6 gigawatts of GPUs. The deal gives OpenAI the opportunity to acquire about 10% of AMD, with shares vesting in stages based on deployment milestones and AMD share-price targets.
US chip controls reshape AMD’s China plans
US export restrictions on China directly affected AMD’s MI308 AI chips. In April 2025, AMD estimated that the restrictions could result in an $800 million revenue loss. After the curbs were lifted in July, the company said it would resume compliant shipments to China.
By September, AMD and Nvidia had agreed to give the US government 15% of revenue from chip sales to China in order to maintain export licences. At a US Senate hearing that year, Su said that if US technology could not be widely adopted around the world, other technologies could gain ground, adding that real-world use helps drive innovation.
Su’s career has also brought recognition beyond the company. In 2022, MIT renamed the building housing MIT.nano the Lisa T. Su Building. She has also established a scholarship supporting women graduate students with achievements in nanotechnology. In 2024, Time named her CEO of the Year, making her the first woman to receive the honour. Su and Huang are related; Nvidia’s announcement of Huang’s departure has again put her industry experience and AMD’s competitive position in the spotlight.