How AMD CEO Lisa Su is taking on Nvidia

Nvidia became the most valuable company in the world this month, overtaking Apple and Microsoft, thanks to its semiconductor chips which are at the forefront of the artificial intelligence boom.

But it’s the woman who leads one of Nvidia’s biggest competitors who is really capturing our attention. She is well on her way to becoming a global household name in leadership.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) CEO Lisa Su is an engineer who launched her career in semiconductor device physics more than three decades ago. Now aged 54, she was born in Tainan, the capital of Taiwan, before moving to the US with her parents when she was three and later taking on a career working to advance global chipmaking.

When she took the CEO role at AMD in 2014, the company was believed to be on the verge of bankruptcy.

Facing billions of dollars of debt and struggling to keep up with rivals, Su led AMD’s renewed focus on chip redesign to restore confidence in the company, including overseeing a five-year project to develop the chip behind the world’s most powerful supercomputer. She’s been described as the “saviour of AMD” but also as a leader who is “clear that it’s about everyone around her”.

Su’s been at the helm of AMD for almost a decade, a role that saw her recently named one of the world’s newest billionaires, having turned the business during a period in which AMD shares have increased nearly 40 times. With AMD supplying GPU chips to companies beefing up their computing power and Su overseeing game-changing innovation in chips during her tenure, she is now worth an estimated US$1.3 billion.

Earlier this month, Su launched AMD’s latest AI processes and shared a plan to develop AI chips over the next two years to take on Nvidia, which now commands around 80% of the market share for AI semiconductors.

So what’s behind her success?

Watch some of her presentations, and you see someone who is calm, engaged, funny and collaborative. She’s also open about her mistakes and what she’s good at, and she’s clearly happy to take on a challenge.

Speaking a couple of months back at SXSW, she said she believes in “running toward a problem”.

“The idea is we are all working night and day on things, we may as well work night and day on something that’s really important,” she said.

She also had the foresight to launch her career into what many would have once considered a niche industry in semiconductor chips and become personally obsessed with the potential of such work well before it could ever be known that it would become what it is today.

“I was a nerd at heart,” she says describing her first “grunt job” working in a semiconductor lab after graduating from MIT.

She says being CEO of AMD is her dream job, and she loves making products that matter. But taking the company through a period of change and transformation has been risky and challenging.

“When I first took over as CEO like any country without enough resources, we were doing too many things. It was important for us to decide what we’re going to be really good at – chips for high-performance computing,” she says.

“It turns out that wasn’t a bad bet; people really need chips for high-performance computing.”

Su describes her leadership style as one of being a “doer”. With a team of 25,000, she sets the vision and then helps the team make it happen.

“My role is to set very ambitious goals and help the team get it done. I love going into the labs, seeing the latest and greatest going on, and spending time with our customers and partners,” she said. “As we say, we’re only as good as our last product so let’s get the next one done.”

On going head-to-head with Nvidia, she says that AI is the most important technology now and will be over the next ten years. We’re early in the current cycle of what’s needed, and there is no one-size-fits-all for tech. “We have a lot of respect for Nvidia. They have done tremendously. But we also have a lot of confidence in where we’re going,” she said.

One of the most inspiring things about Su is her desire and ability to take on a problem and solve it. She says this comes down to her appetite for education and learning.

“The advice I would give to people is that all education is about learning to think,” she told the SXSW audience. “It’s about learning to problem solve. Whether that was thirty years ago, now or thirty years in the future, it’s the same.”

This article was first published by Women’s Agenda.

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