In coverage of the big semiconductor market and its connection to AI innovation, you’ll see a few big names thrown around. One is Advanced Micro Devices or AMD, a major player in the data center industry.
AMD CEO Lisa Su has had a lot to do with the company’s rise. Notably, Su is also an MIT graduate, and has served on other corporate boards like that of Cisco, in addition to being appointed vice president of IBM‘s semiconductor research and development center in the 1990s.
Now she steers the wheel at AMD, where competition is heating up, and geopolitical tensions are also having an effect.
I’ve enjoyed working with Su and wanted to celebrate her recognition in the media and her track record in corporate leadership.
A recent piece in Time magazine details some of Su’s rejuvenation strategy for the firm. First there were ambitious goals set, like providing for future large-scale computing needs, developing a chip for an exascale computer, and then there were the deals made to keep the company afloat while that innovation happened.
Eventually, as the writer notes, AMD people embraced a “chiplet” architecture, creating what they called the “Zen” chip, and as Intel’s share of the market dropped, AMD held on despite the domination of GPU market share by Nvidia. (I’ve covered this quite a bit.)
Today’s executives have big challenges: one is navigating the tendency toward export controls. Another is anticipating rapid industry changes that can be hard to pivot for. The Time piece illustrates Su’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm for tech, personally visiting El Capitan and other data centers to celebrate AMD‘s role in building these mammoth projects, and changes like AMD’s shift from gaming to data center markets. That will probably be useful as we worry about the potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, as manufacturers of all kinds continue to clamor for chips, and last but not least, as we see AGI capabilities spiral up and up.
“When you invest in a new area, it is a five- to 10-year arc to really build out all of the various pieces,” she says, as quoted in the Time piece. “The thing about our business is, everything takes time.”
This is a good profile of an inspiring leader, at a time when many are looking very closely at this market as a whole.
