She took down Intel. Now AMD's CEO has a new miracle to perform.
Emma Cosgrove, Helen Li
When a top analyst skewered AMD's software, CEO Lisa Su called him personally to chat.
AMD's AI chips have struggled to compete against Nvidia's dominance, and software is its weakness.
Those who know Su told Business Insider she would never settle for second place.
What should a CEO do when their company is publicly called out for an inferior product? Many would stay silent. Not AMD CEO Lisa Su.
In early February, AMD released new data showing how well its AI chips performed at training large language models, using benchmarks developed by a company called SemiAnalysis. Just weeks earlier, the same group had published a searing review of AMD's tentpole graphics processing unit.
The analysts wrote that while the chip looked good on paper, reaching its potential in reality was almost impossible with AMD's existing software. The chief analyst, Dylan Patel, and the rest of the SemiAnalysis team spent five months assessing AMD's GPU, which has struggled to gain market share and mindshare against the dominant player, Nvidia.
"We were hopeful that AMD could emerge as a strong competitor to Nvidia in training workloads, but, as of today, this is unfortunately not the case," SemiAnalysis published in December.
The next day, Patel got a call from Su. The call was scheduled for 30 minutes, but it lasted 90.
"Feedback is a gift even when it's critical," Su tweeted after the call. The new performance data released in February was a punch back in a fight that's far from over.
2024 was the year of Lisa Su. She was Time and Chief Executive Magazine's CEO of the year.
Last year, AMD outsold Intel in its data center business, overtaking its old rival in the traditional data center world. This became the triumphant apex of Su's first decade as the CEO of AMD. Revenue for the whole of 2024 was up 14% year over year — gross profits up 22% — and yet when Su reported the results in February, the stock went down.
As Su achieved what many thought impossible and conquered her old foil, Intel, a new one had already presented itself in the AI prognosticator Nvidia, led by CEO Jensen Huang, Su's cousin born in the same region of Taiwan as her. Shareholders wouldn't let her forget her biggest rival.
Whether AMD can meet the seemingly insurmountable challenge of Nvidia's estimated 90% market share may come down to the approaches of two Taiwanese-born, US-educated, distantly related CEOs.
Su has already stated the company's goals. She's leaning into open-source software and beefing up support for large language model training and inference customers. Most importantly, she's raising the bar for AMD's software so that it can better stand up to Nvidia's — since Huang has long professed that software is Nvidia's secret sauce.
"We are still in the very early stages with AI, and we believe there's no one-size-fits-all approach to AI compute," an AMD spokesperson told Business Insider. AMD declined to make Su available for an interview.
BI spoke with nine people for this story — five of whom have at one point had a personal relationship with Su and three of whom worked under her at AMD. They said that whether in 2007, 2017, or 2027, the stoic, thoughtful, quietly confident executive walking the brightest stages in the tech world had been and would be exactly who she seems. Though she may never conquer Nvidia, she won't rest while she's in the No. 2 spot. Her play involves intently listening to partners as well as critics, and it's worked before.
AMD CEO Lisa Su's public presentation style has changed since she took over the company in 2014. AMD
Lisa Su says, 'Why not?'
Some early indications suggested that starting at the bottom motivated Su to get to the top.
Born in Taiwan and raised in New York, Su intentionally picked the most challenging STEM field she could think of: electrical engineering. After earning her doctorate, she received multiple offers to stay in academia but decided to join Texas Instruments instead, Dimitri Antoniadis, her thesis advisor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told BI. She wanted to manage people and projects, she recently told Stanford business students. After leaving TI for IBM, she was tapped to serve as a technical assistant for Lou Gerstner, IBM's chairman and CEO.
Antoniadis recalled late-night phone conversations with Su when she was at these "juncture points" in her career. She left IBM in 2007, spent 4 ½ years at Freescale Semiconductor, and then came to AMD in 2012.
The professor got one such call in late 2014. Su had managed AMD's various business units and operations for nearly three years — deep in the weeds of the entire company yet without the authority to set the overall direction. She called Antoniadis when she was asked to take the CEO job, which meant going after a market dominated by Intel. The original Silicon Valley icon had a market capitalization of more than $150 billion and a reputation for ruthlessness. AMD's market cap was just $2 billion.
"At the time, I said: 'Lisa, are you serious? Taking on Intel?' She said, 'Why not?'" Antoniadis told BI.
Su sought multiple opinions on the big decision to head AMD. Lip-Bu Tan, a legendary semiconductor CEO turned investor who's set to step into the Intel CEO role on March 18, was also on the call list. Tan and Su met years earlier when she was at Freescale Semiconductor, and he was impressed from the start, he told BI.
Tan was fully aware of AMD's sad state at the time. The firm had completed two rounds of layoffs since 2011 and pulled out of the processor market. The company needed focus.
"Only the gaming business was doing well. The rest were struggling," Tan said. Despite this, he didn't hesitate to recommend the job to Su. He had just orchestrated a revival of a similar magnitude at Cadence Design Systems and knew the opportunity such a turnaround could be.
"The market value was less than $3 billion — you can't go wrong with that. It is so undervalued," Tan said of AMD.
Su took over AMD on October 8, 2014. A 7% staff cut proceeded, and Su set out to make long-term bets and win back customers. Tan said Su soon had top tech execs such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Dell's chief operating officer, Jeff Clarke, trusting her, mainly because of her hands-on style. Even for routine annual business reviews, Su knows all the numbers and listens intently to concerns, sources said.
"They love her. She is very engaged — very involved," Tan said.
Su has evolved her style over her 10 years as CEO of AMD. She's somewhat less stoic, makes jokes onstage, wears brighter colors, has more perfectly coiffed hair, and has come to appreciate Christian Louboutin heels. AMD declined to comment on these details.
"I am not surprised at all where she is right now. I truly expected it," Antoniadis said.
AMD's market cap has grown to about $160 billion as of Wednesday — much higher than its $2 billion market cap when Su first started. This month, all AI stocks have taken a dive amid uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration's policy shifts.
Now, Su has a new miracle to perform.
Su vs. Huang
In 2018, Su sat with a handful of Wall Street analysts in a private meeting space near the Las Vegas Convention Center. The Consumer Electronics Show, one of the largest tech conferences of the year, bustled in the massive building's halls.
Su was just over three years into her job as CEO of AMD, and the company's stock hovered above just $10 per share.
The analysts in that Las Vegas conference room had a lot of advice for the then 48-year-old CEO, according to a person present, who asked not to be named since the session was private. The room was full of men eager to tell Su how to seize on her progress and take AMD to the next level. There was chatter in the nerdier accelerated computing circles that machine learning was ready to scale, and the analysts weren't sure AMD was seeing the signs.
Su took it all in and politely thanked everyone. She knew accelerated computing would change the world as early as 2017, she has since said in interviews. The graphics processing unit made that possible.
At the time, the entertainment industry used them for gaming and graphics rendering. While AMD has designed this kind of hardware for two decades, Nvidia's Huang beat the entire tech industry to the punch when he identified the AI opportunity for GPUs and started building software to help it spread. Since ChatGPT's birth, Nvidia and AMD have been in an epic race — only Nvidia had a massive head start.
Both Huang and Su are notoriously hardworking — late nights and weekends are a given.
But Huang is a showman. He dominates a stage whether it be at the front of a boardroom or a concert arena. Su is less flashy. She rarely, if ever, raises her voice, and her business strategy echoes that quiet, inexhaustible, confident consistency, sources said.
"You know she's in charge, but she's also a very quiet leader," said Jodi Shelton, the CEO and cofounder of the Global Semiconductor Alliance. Shelton recalled an intimate dinner at Su's Texas home with just Su and her husband, Daniel Lin, where Su asked most of the questions.
"She doesn't need to interject when someone's speaking. She doesn't have to be the loudest person in the room," Shelton continued.
Onstage, Su often paces, making measured announcements. At team meetings, she drills for answers about what needs to be done next and delegates tasks, personally reviewing AMD's GPU distribution on spreadsheets, the AMD employees said.
In a world where CEOs including the former Intel leader Pat Gelsinger have announced plans such as five nodes in four years and fell short in execution, AMD has slowly marched forward. Even Nvidia's yearly cadence of new GPU generations has hit production and installation snags. Su is wary of overpromising and underexecuting, several sources said. Execution is nonnegotiable.
"That's not very easy for people to do for such a long time," said Sharon Zhou, the founder of Lamini, who has committed to AMD hardware over Nvidia. "Which is why I think she presents the main threat to Nvidia. It forces Nvidia into a place where they can't make mistakes."
Huang is motivated by being so early that he can form new markets around new technologies, the Nvidia executive Rev Lebaredian told BI. Su wants to meet existing demand with an unfailingly great product.
"She knows AMD products technically in and out and can hold her own discussing any product with its respective engineers," one AMD employee said. "She's pretty quiet in person, but you could tell by the way she was looking at the lab and talking to the engineers that she was proud and happy to be there."
Her relentless consistency and focus on strong, reciprocal customer relationships make her undiminishable as a competitor, even for Nvidia, sources said.
"She's one of the most responsive people," Zhou said. When Zhou was trying to close Series A funding for Lamini, Su offered up the entire afternoon to chat with prospective investors, a day after an earnings call.
Lisa Su listens to a man speak next to a server while onlookers raise their phones to capture the moment.
Su's star has risen even as AMD struggles to take market share from Nvidia. Here, she's pictured at Computex Taipei, one of the world's largest computer and technology expos, in June 2024. AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying
The only way is software
Many chip industry analysts agree that while AMD's hardware has caught up, it can't truly compete without better software. Nvidia's CUDA software has become the industry standard and allows engineers to program GPUs with flexibility and relative ease. AMD's software is still a work in progress, as SemiAnalysis's report detailed.
For the full 2024 fiscal year, Nvidia reported $115.2 billion in revenue in its data center segment — where most AI computing happens. AMD reported $12.6 billion for data centers in the same time period (though the reporting periods are slightly different). It's an enormous gulf that even the best of execution may never close.
Those who know Su say she will never settle for second.
"She does want to win, which doesn't mean second. It actually means first. First, you have to be second, and then you get to be first," Zhou said.
If Su has a winning strategy in mind, it's still a mystery to some AMD watchers.
In a February 5 note to investors, the Bank of America analyst Vivek Arya wrote that AMD had not yet "managed to articulate" how or from where it would wrest market share from Nvidia.
"It could take much more in software, scale deployment, and system-level integration to break AMD's current less than 5% market share," Arya wrote.
Winning for Su will be about picking her fights, said Tan, the incoming Intel CEO, who's also friends with Huang. In 2024, Nvidia's R&D budget was about twice AMD's. Su still has to be discerning.
"You have to pick your best field," Tan said. "You can't do everything, like Jensen," he continued. Huang makes the menu, he said. Su can choose only a few dishes to battle over.
On the company's February earnings call, Su moved up the company's next chip launch by a few months.
AMD's fourth-quarter earnings beat expectations, yet investors balked. The Wall Street analyst consensus was that revenue was growing, though not enough came from AI.
"This is a 10-year arc. This is not a two-year arc. So let's not think about this as what's going to happen next quarter," Su told Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at its conference in September.