In the foyer lurks her mustachioed security guard, a man with arms larger than my thighs. Moments later, the press attach\u00e9 pops his head back into the room: \u201cShe\u2019ll be arriving shortly.\u201d <\/p>\n
For all the commotion, Su does not come off as a diva. \u201cNice to see you,\u201d she says as she walks in, wearing a blue blazer, white trainers, and toting (yet another) bottle of Fiji water. The interview is only one hour; she will not go thirsty. <\/p>\n
Su is not exactly warm, but not cold either. Rather, she is serious. A serious woman in a very serious job, the daughter of immigrant parents, an MIT engineer who climbed the greasy pole of corporate America to run what is today one of the most important companies in the world. <\/p>\n
In 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT and triggered a multitrillion-dollar race to build data centres as the world was suddenly swept up in the artificial intelligence revolution<\/a>. The critical piece \u2014 the brains of these systems \u2014 are the meticulously engineered wafers of silicon packed with billions of transistors made by the likes of AMD. <\/p>\n Profits for the first half of the year jumped fivefold to $1.6 billion on $15.1 billion in sales, up 33 per cent on the same period last year. Its surging share price \u2014 the stock closed on Friday at $167.76 \u2014 pushed its market value to $272 billion. That makes AMD, which employs 29,000 people globally, far larger than Britain\u2019s biggest public company, drugs giant AstraZeneca, and well over double the value of Intel<\/a>, its stumbling, long-time US rival. <\/p>\n Lisa Su with her husband, Daniel Lin, in New York last year<\/p>\n NOAM GALAI\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n AMD is not, of course, Nvidia, the $4.3 trillion behemoth run by Su\u2019s \u201cdistant\u201d cousin Jensen Huang \u2014 that family relation is another area on which I am told not to tread. But this is the best time to be in the semiconductor business since the dawn of the personal computer \u2014 perhaps better. And Su, having executed a decade-long revival of AMD, has put it in prime position to reap the rewards of the AI-ification of everything. <\/p>\n The world wants digital brains, and that is what she is selling. <\/p>\n This moment has also vaulted her, and AMD, to the centre of the geopolitical stage. She and Nvidia\u2019s Huang made news this month when they struck an export deal with President Trump<\/a>. In exchange for handing a 15 per cent cut of all their China sales to the US government, Trump carved them out of a national security ban that restricted chip sales to China. Did she hammer out that deal personally with The Donald? <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not going to get into all of the back and forth,\u201d she says diplomatically. But it is, \u201cvery safe to say\u201d, she adds, that she is spending a lot more time in Washington than she used to. \u201cI actually do believe AI is a race, and it\u2019s a race to intelligence. It\u2019s a race to capability. So every country is now thinking about how do they have their own AI policy and AI plans?\u201d<\/p>\n Critics bashed the profit-sharing arrangement as \u201ccrony capitalism.\u201d Su won\u2019t take that bait. \u201cWhere do you draw the line of what is national security versus what is, you know, just having more people in your ecosystem. I think we found the right balance.\u201d<\/p>\n Su at a Senate committee hearing about the future of AI in May with Sam Altman of OpenAI, Michael Intrator of CoreWeave and Brad Smith of Microsoft<\/p>\n CHIP SOMODEVILLA\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n It must be said that both Nvidia and AMD are selling chips specially designed for the Chinese market with certain computing and memory capabilities \u201cturned off\u201d to make them less powerful. <\/p>\n Beyond politics, however, Su is a techno-optimist. And she is convinced that AI is in the process of fundamentally altering \u2014 and improving \u2014 the world. In ten years, she predicts, \u201cwe will not recognise the world that we\u2019re living in today in terms of the capability that\u2019s out there. And I think that\u2019s a remarkable thing. For all of us who are living in this technology world today, that\u2019s what we live for. We live to build technology that can change the world. And this is uniquely that.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 Louisa Clarence-Smith: We should be worried that the AI utopia is being shaped by men<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n More extraordinary than the present moment, though, is the fact that AMD is around to take part in it at all. When Su took over in 2014, the company looked as though it might be breathing its last breaths. <\/p>\n Su arrived in New York from Taiwan aged three. Her father, who had earned a place to study at Columbia University, worked as a statistician. Her mother was an accountant who later became an entrepreneur. <\/p>\n Su and her brother were encouraged to study hard. At MIT, Su chose electrical engineering \u201cbecause it was the hard thing\u201d, she says. A part-time job at a semiconductor lab \u201cdoing grunt work for graduate students\u201d first exposed her to semiconductors. She was instantly hooked. \u201cI was taking little two-inch wafers and putting them in machines and having them do things,\u201d she recalls. \u201cI just thought it was the coolest thing on the face of the planet, that you could build all of this intelligence into these little chips that were the size of a quarter.\u201d <\/p>\n After earning a PhD in electrical engineering, she landed a job first at Texas Instruments and then IBM, where she spent 14 years moving up the ranks. Freescale Semiconductor, a spinout from Motorola, hired her as technology chief before she was poached by AMD in 2012. She was appointed chief executive two years later. \u201cThat was a difficult time for the company,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n Founded in the late 1960s about the same time as, and down the road from, Intel<\/a>, AMD was what one analyst called the \u201cperennial runner-up\u201d. While Intel became the industry standard, AMD pumped out inferior chips. It existed in the mediocre middle. A corporate overhaul by Su\u2019s predecessor was stalling; its market value had sunk to just $3 billion. <\/p>\n Forrest Norrod, head of AMD\u2019s data centre, was Su\u2019s first hire. He recalls: \u201cAfter I joined, I cannot tell you how many dozens of calls I got with people saying, \u2018What the heck did you just do? AMD is irrelevant.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Forrest Norrod, head of AMD\u2019s data centre<\/p>\n AMD<\/p>\n An engineer at heart, Su made a few bold moves. She pulled the plug on AMD\u2019s core line of central processing units (CPUs) for data centres and redesigned them from scratch, effectively exiting a market so that it could then re-enter years later with a better product. The revamp, which took years to deliver, paid dividends, allowing AMD to undercut Intel<\/a> with a new design that was cheaper and better performing. Its chips started gaining share in the markets for laptops as well as data centres, which were booming even before AI, as companies put more of their data in the cloud. <\/p>\n In 2022, the unthinkable happened: AMD leapfrogged the market value of Intel, the company in whose shadow it had operated for half a century. Abhi Talwalkar, a former Intel executive and AMD board director, said one of Su\u2019s strengths is being able to pull people along, even when the ultimate goal seems impossible. <\/p>\n \u201cGreat leaders will get the job done, push the team hard, and the team will sign up over and over again, versus leaving a bunch of dead bodies behind,\u201d he says. \u201cShe sets a high bar and has high expectations. She pushes people hard, but at the same time, her sleeves are rolled up.\u201d <\/p>\n The results have been remarkable. Since taking over, AMD\u2019s value has grown 55-fold. Thanks to her share options, Su is worth well north of half-a-billion dollars.. The day we meet, she sold a cool $37 million on the market. Her turnaround has been turned into a Harvard Business School case study. <\/p>\n But now the hard work starts. In 2017, she told her engineers to start developing a new line of graphics processing units (GPUs), the specialised chips used mostly in video games, amid early signs that they could be useful for AI systems. She doubled down in 2022, redirecting huge resources to launch a product powerful enough to grab share in the soon-to-boom AI industry. That bet has also paid off. Its data centre operation saw sales nearly double to $12.7 billion last year, driven largely by GPUs. <\/p>\n Su holding an AI processor at a conference in Taiwan last year<\/p>\n ANNABELLE CHIH\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n But the mountain in front of her is perhaps taller than the last. Nvidia has more than 90 per cent of the GPU market. Last year it sold $130 billion, a fivefold increase from two years prior. <\/p>\n Su and AMD once again find themselves the underdogs. But the opportunity is vast. AMD reckons the market for AI chips could hit $500 billion by 2028. And having watched her pull off the trick once, Talwalkar is confident she can do it again. <\/p>\n \u201cThe company went through a remarkable pivot a number of years ago, directing so much of the company\u2019s attention and resources to AI, to really mount a similar game plan that was executed versus Intel, now versus the big player in AI in Nvidia,\u201d he says. \u201cI think customers are starting to see history repeat itself.\u201d <\/p>\n Time will tell, Su says. \u201cI like to say that the bets that you make in technology, you won\u2019t know for three to five years whether you made the right ones.\u201d <\/p>\n![\"Lisa](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\/67ed9a09-e850-4767-a28b-682f9eb96067.jpg\")
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