Lisa Su

Lisa Su has engineered one of the most dramatic corporate turnarounds in semiconductor history, transforming Advanced Micro Devices from a distant also-ran into a genuine rival to Nvidia and Intel in the chips that power modern computing and artificial intelligence. As chair and chief executive, she now presides over a company whose processors and accelerators sit inside hyperscale data centres worldwide.

Born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1969 and raised in the United States, Su earned bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from MIT. She began her career at Texas Instruments before moving to IBM, where she played a key role in developing copper interconnect technology that became an industry standard, and later served as technical assistant to IBM chief executive Lou Gerstner.

After a stint as chief technology officer at Freescale Semiconductor, Su joined AMD in 2012 and was appointed president and CEO in October 2014, at a moment when the company was widely regarded as struggling to survive against Intel and Nvidia. She refocused AMD's roadmap on high-performance CPUs and GPUs, driving the Ryzen and EPYC product lines that clawed back server and PC market share.

More recently, Su has pushed AMD deep into AI accelerators with the Instinct GPU line and the $49 billion acquisition of Xilinx, positioning the company as a credible alternative to Nvidia for the data-centre compute that trains and serves large AI models. She became AMD's chair in 2022, consolidating her authority over the company's strategy at a moment when demand for AI infrastructure is reshaping the entire semiconductor industry.

Su's leadership has been widely recognised, including being named Time's CEO of the Year in 2024, and she is regularly cited as one of the most influential executives in technology. Her career is closely watched as a bellwether for how much of the AI compute market can be contested beyond Nvidia's dominance.