QUEEN OF CHIPS

Lisa Su has built AMD into a chipmaking phenom. And as the US-China tech war rages on, she's at the center of it all.

- BY LAUREN GOODE PHOTOGRAPH BY LINDA LIEPINA

A PIECE OF advice if you're meeting with Lisa Su: Wear sneakers.

Su, the leader of AMD, moves fast. To hear her and everyone else in semiconductors talk, the US is in an Al race with China—and Donald Trump keeps changing the rules. She travels often to Washington, DC, to grease the wheels. All while steering her firm to seize the moment: AMD's new AI chips, she says, beat out those of her main rival, Nvidia. As CEO, Su took on a struggling firm and executed a remarkable 10-year turnaround. She embraced chiplets, went big on high-performance computing and data centers, and struck deals with top firms (OpenAI, Meta, Google). Under her watch, AMD's market cap rose from around $2 billion to nearly $300 billion.

Su was born in Taiwan and raised in Queens, New York. Her father was a statistician; her mother an accountant turned entrepreneur. Su earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from MIT, then went to Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor. After joining AMD in 2012, she quickly rose to COO. As Su tells it, six months in, the chairman of the board called and said, “It’s time, Lisa.” Su’s response: “That seems kinda quick.”

Aside from her well-known bona fides (she’s also a distant cousin of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang), less is known about Su herself—what drives her, what irritates her, where her politics lie. This is what I hoped to learn on my visit to AMD in Austin, Texas, in late June. Our conversation kicked off with geopolitics.

What would you like Trump—and the public—to understand about your AI chips?

That limiting the number of users in our ecosystem is bad, not just for AMD but for the US. The idea that somehow, if we don’t ship chips to the rest of the world, that AI progress is going to stop—it’s not going to stop. AI progress is going to continue, and we'd rather it develop on us than someone else.