When Lisa Su became CEO of Advanced Micro Devices
in late 2014, the company was in dire straits and on the brink of potential bankruptcy.
In its core market, computer processors, AMD wasn’t competitive with rival Intel
. The company had billions of dollars of debt, and had committed to manufacturing chips for customers that may or may not exist. By the end of the year, AMD was worth a mere $2 billion in market value, while Intel was valued at about $180 billion.
“I actually had mentors in my career saying, you know, I don’t think that that’s a good move,” Su, 55, said in a speech at Stanford University in March, reflecting on her decision to take the gig a little over a decade earlier.
Su is in a very different spot today.
AMD passed rival Intel in market value in 2022 and is now worth $172 billion, a roughly 85-fold increase during Su’s tenure. Millions of gamers rely on AMD processors every day as they power up their Microsoft
Xbox and Sony PlayStation consoles. AMD chips are so important that the U.S. government sees them as critical to national security.
Yet AMD still views itself as an underdog. That’s because it’s a distant second in artificial intelligence, behind Nvidia
, the almost $3 trillion behemoth that dominates the market for graphics processing units, or GPUs. To have a serious role in the future of technology, AMD knows it needs a bigger chunk of the AI GPU market, where the biggest tech companies in the world are spending many billions of dollars a year on advanced infrastructure.
Underpinning AMD’s strategy is Su’s belief, rooted in her engineering background, that success in this industry is driven by making the right technical decisions that lead to the highest-performance chips. It can take a long time to see the results show up in products.
“One of the things that I like to say about the semiconductor industry, or technology in general, is the decisions that we make today, you will really see the impact three to five years down the road,” Su said at Stanford. “It is all about making the right bets.”
