When Lisa Su became AMD’s chief executive on October 8, 2014, the company was worth about $3 billion. Analysts were openly discussing bankruptcy. In 2026 its market value is above $700 billion, and the stock hit a record near $577 in July. For readers in Asia, there is a Taiwan thread running through all of it: Su was born in Tainan, and her chips are built by a Taiwanese foundry.
Su was born on November 7, 1969, and her family moved to New York City when she was three. Her father was a statistician, her mother an accountant who later started a business, and both pushed math early. At the Bronx High School of Science she leaned toward engineering, not the medicine her parents had pictured. At MIT she took three degrees, all in electrical engineering, finishing her doctorate in 1994 with work on silicon-on-insulator technology, a way of building transistors on a layer of insulating material so they run faster and more efficiently.
From the lab to the corner office
She spent a short time at Texas Instruments, then joined IBM in 1995 and stayed nearly a decade. There she led the team that pioneered commercial silicon-on-insulator manufacturing, a technique many in the industry doubted. It paid off: chip speed improved by roughly 20 to 30 percent without shrinking transistors further, and the method became standard. She also ran IBM’s emerging products division and worked on the copper interconnects that replaced aluminum wiring inside chips.
In 2007 she moved to Freescale Semiconductor as chief technology officer and later ran its networking and multimedia business, her first job with profit-and-loss responsibility. AMD hired her in 2012 as a senior vice president and general manager. Two years later she replaced Rory Read as CEO.
One bet on Zen
The company she inherited had lost most of its server market share. Its PC chip business was shrinking along with the laptop market, and the stock traded around two dollars. Her first moves were about survival. She leaned on the semi-custom division, which supplied chips for the PlayStation and Xbox consoles and kept revenue steady. Then she put AMD’s thin engineering budget behind a single new CPU architecture built from scratch, called Zen.
There was no plan B. If Zen failed, AMD could not afford to try again.
It did not fail. Zen shipped as the Ryzen line in 2017, with a roughly 52 percent gain in instructions per clock over AMD’s previous generation. For the first time in over a decade AMD had a chip that competed on merit at the high end, and not only in the budget tier. The EPYC server line followed, taking server market share from a low single-digit base to well above 30 percent. AMD rebuilt its graphics business too.
The AI years
Then came the AI boom. AMD pitched its Instinct accelerators, the MI300, MI350 and MI450 generations, as the main alternative to Nvidia for training and running large models. According to 247WallSt, they now carry a 6-gigawatt OpenAI deployment and a Meta partnership for up to 6 GW of Instinct GPUs. Acquisitions sped things up: Xilinx for roughly $49 billion in 2022, and ZT Systems, which closed in March 2025 and brought rack-scale AI systems.
The ride was rough. The stock was cut in half in 2022 on the PC and crypto bust, and again in the summer of 2025, when about $800 million in MI308 export charges hit second-quarter margins. In the first quarter of 2026 revenue reached $10.25 billion, with Data Center up 57 percent from a year earlier. Skeptics point to a P/E of 204 and China export risk.
The engineering world noticed Su before Wall Street did. In 2021 she won the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal, the first woman to do so. She has appeared on the Forbes list of the 100 most powerful women, was named to Time’s “Architects of AI” list in 2025, and has received a National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Forbes puts her net worth at about $1.3 billion in 2026, most of it AMD equity. She is also a distant relative of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, who was likewise born in Taiwan.
Sources
- AMD’s $130,000 Decade: U.S. Chipmaker Rises from Near-Bankruptcy to AI Leader
- Learn All Crypto Topics | Phemex Academy
