How AMD CEO Lisa Su rebuilt struggling chipmaker, became a billionaire

When Lisa Su became CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) a decade ago, it hardly resembled a multibillion-dollar company.

AMD stock was languishing around $3 per share. The company had cut about 25% of its staff, according to Time. But under Su’s leadership, the chipmaker has flourished: Today, AMD has a market cap of $205.95 billion and its stock trades at roughly $127 per share.

Su was named Time’s CEO of the Year for 2024 on Tuesday, and the 55-year-old’s net worth has soared alongside AMD’s success — up to $1.3 billion, Forbes estimated in April. For comparison, Su was paid a base salary of $1 million and a performance-based bonus of $1.2 million in 2014 when she took over as CEO, the Seattle Times reported in 2020.

Born in Taiwan, Su immigrated to the U.S. with her parents at age 3 so her father, a mathematician, could attend graduate school in New York. Growing up, “my father used to quiz me with math tables at the dining room table,” she told Forbes last year. “That’s how I first got into math.”

Su wasn’t initially interested in following her father’s footsteps into a STEM career. As a teenager, she dreamed of becoming a concert pianist, she said: “I wasn’t good enough to do that, so I became an engineer.”

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She earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and spent her early career working in a variety of roles at Texas Instruments and IBM in the 1990s — both huge tech companies, during that era.

“I was really lucky early in my career,” Su told Time. “Every two years, I did a different thing.”

In 2012, Su was hired at AMD as a senior vice president and general manager of the company’s global business units, according to her LinkedIn profile. Two years later, she ascended to the CEO role, becoming the first woman to lead AMD since the company’s founding in 1969.

“I felt like I was in training for the opportunity to do something meaningful in the semiconductor industry,” she said. “And AMD was my shot.”

Playing the long game

Su is one of few Fortune 500 CEOs with a PhD. Her engineering background helped her spearhead some of the technological innovations — including a new faster CPU chip for computers — that drove AMD’s recent success.

Friends and colleagues describe her as a “shrewd strategist,” and she sometimes holds meetings on weekends and expects employees to work past midnight, Time reported. Her high expectations can make it challenging for people to survive at AMD long-term, tech industry analyst and former AMD executive Patrick Moorhead told the magazine.

That might be by design: “I don’t believe leaders are born. I believe leaders are trained,” said Su.

Upon becoming CEO, Su promoted a three-part plan to help AMD compete with rivals Intel and Nvidia, Time reported: sell only high-quality products, deepen customer trust and simplify the firm’s operations. The long-term plan took time to pay dividends, but in 2022, AMD surpassed Intel in both market value and annual revenue.

Nvidia, on the other hand, isn’t just the world’s largest chipmaker — it recently overtook Apple as the world’s most valuable publicly traded company. But Su measures success in decades, not quarters, she said.

“When you invest in a new area, it is a five- to 10-year arc to really build out all of the various pieces,” said Su. “The thing about our business is, everything takes time.”

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