Lauren Goode
While everyone else has been talking about Nvidia’s GPUs, Lisa Su has discreetly turned AMD into a chipmaking phenom. And as the US-China tech war rages, she’s at the center of it all.A piece of advice if you’re meeting with Lisa Su: Wear sneakers. Su, the leader of AMD, moves fast these days, though I suspect that’s always been the case. Her company's chips underpin the artificial intelligence that’s changing the world at breakneck speeds. To hear Su and literally everyone else in semiconductors talk about it, the US is in an AI race with China—and the rules keep changing. The Trump administration has once again shifted its stance on what kind of chips can and can’t be shipped to China, with the latest decree being that the US will take a 15 percent cut of AMD and Nvidia chip sales to China. Meanwhile, on the home front, Su has claimed that AMD’s newest AI chips can outperform Nvidia’s—part of her strategy to keep eroding Nvidia’s dominance in the market.
So, yeah: Be ready to keep up. Under Lisa Su, the stalwart American semiconductor company has reasserted itself as a force in the age of AI. “Reasserted” doesn’t do it justice: Su took a struggling AMD and executed a 10-year turnaround that has been, as one economist put it, nothing short of remarkable. Since 2014, when Su took over as CEO, AMD’s market cap has risen from around $2 billion to nearly $300 billion.
Aside from her well-known bona fides, Su herself—what drives her, what inspires her, what irritates her, where her politics lie—is less known. This is what I was hoping to learn when I visited AMD’s offices and labs in the hills of Austin, Texas, on a day in late June when the wind seemed to do little more than push heat around
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