Lisa Su

Current Company

AMD — Chair & CEO

The Turnaround That Stunned the Industry

Lisa Su became CEO of AMD in October 2014, inheriting a company that was on the verge of bankruptcy. AMD's stock was trading below $3, the company had lost significant market share to Intel and NVIDIA, and many analysts questioned whether AMD could survive as an independent company. Lisa Su, a PhD electrical engineer from MIT who had previously held senior roles at IBM, Freescale, and Texas Instruments, took on the challenge of rebuilding AMD from the ground up.

What Lisa Su achieved at AMD is one of the most extraordinary corporate turnarounds in technology history. She bet the company on a new CPU architecture — Zen — that would take years to develop, while simultaneously restructuring AMD's operations and refocusing the company on high-performance computing. When the Zen-based Ryzen processors launched in 2017, they were competitive with Intel for the first time in over a decade. AMD's stock would eventually rise from under $3 to over $150 under Lisa Su's leadership.

Competing on Two Fronts

Lisa Su's strategic vision was to make AMD competitive in both CPUs and GPUs — taking on Intel in processors and NVIDIA in graphics and AI accelerators simultaneously. Under Lisa Su's leadership, AMD's EPYC server processors captured significant market share from Intel in the data center, while AMD's Instinct accelerators positioned the company as the primary alternative to NVIDIA in the AI computing market.

Lisa Su's disciplined product roadmap execution has earned her the respect of customers, engineers, and investors alike. As Chair and CEO, Lisa Su has transformed AMD from a perennial underdog into a company that the largest cloud providers and enterprises rely on for their most critical computing workloads. Lisa Su's engineering-first leadership style — she still reviews technical product details personally — has been essential to AMD's culture of execution.