Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su has spent most of her decade in the top job at the chip maker keeping a tight rein on expectations.
Avoiding hype and broad pronouncements has played a big part in reestablishing the creditability of a company that historically struggled to lock down a spot in the front row of the technology industry. Now, as her relentless refrain about making “great products” pays off, she seems ready to embrace the evangelism of some of her counterparts. And that means participating in the artificial intelligence frenzy.
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“I truly believe AI is the most transformational technology that I’ve seen in my career,” Su says in an interview. “It’s faster than anything we’ve ever seen. It’s like we’ve made more progress in the last 18 months than certainly the last 10-plus years.”
Born in Taiwan and raised in New York, Su made the transition from the engineering labs to corporate leadership at some of the chip business’s most iconic companies, including IBM and Texas Instruments. But it’s the transformation of AMD since 2014 from also-ran to technology leader that’s the defining achievement of her career, so far.
Now a new opportunity has emerged — as well as a challenge — in the form of AI chips and Nvidia. That has shifted how her company’s progress is judged, just as AMD emerged from the lifelong shadow of rival Intel.
By all metrics, AMD has improved massively from where it was when she took the job. Under her predecessor, Rory Read, quarterly earnings conference calls focused on cost cutting to keep the company afloat. Now that is a major topic for struggling Intel, which earlier this week ousted CEO Pat Gelsinger.
‘Super fun’
AMD has a market capitalisation of almost US$220-billion, more than twice the value of Intel. Ten years ago, AMD had annual revenue of $5.5-billion. In 2024, it’s on course for five times that amount. Su has spent her earnings announcements this year increasing forecasts for her AI accelerator business sales to more than $5-billion, 10 times the projection being made by Intel.
Su won’t even consider the idea of a victory lap, or of even privately feeling vindicated.
“I don’t know that I do that,” she deadpans before reverting to engineer mode. Getting chips back from manufacturing and seeing they work as designed is Su’s idea of something to celebrate. It’s “super fun”, she says.
Read: AMD throws down gauntlet to Nvidia in AI chip race
That obsession with the basics marks her as different from her predecessors. On a tour of labs where AMD staffers are testing new chips, engineers confide that her visits — designed to encourage them, she says — seldom if ever happened during her predecessors’ tenures. The visits don’t just keep her in touch with what’s going on. They help keep people on their toes when a mistake could cost hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue and delays.
When asked about her reputation for having zero tolerance for excuses and not shying away from showing her displeasure, she smiles.
“Well, I like to win, if that’s okay,” she says. “But what I like is when you look at great leaders in the industry, what they really do is they make their teams better than they thought they could be.”
One man who openly admits to pushing his employees into higher levels of achievement is Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. A distant relative of Su, Huang also spent most of his company’s history in Intel’s shadow, but has now broken loose in one of the most dramatic corporate upswings ever seen.
Nvidia’s growth makes even AMD’s gains pale by comparison, as does the attention it’s getting from investors. Nvidia’s data centre business alone is on track to pull in more revenue than total sales at AMD and Intel combined this year. It’ll become by far the biggest chip maker and is already the most valuable company in the world.
Jensen is brilliant and she fully admires him, Su says. But there’s little interest in the family connection and the two only first met at an industry event when they’d become tech executives.
Over the years they have provided a contrast in public. Huang gives lengthy presentations featuring detailed visionary expositions on the future of technology. Su, by contrast, has grown more slowly into the promotional side of being a tech CEO. For a good chunk of her career in the top job, she focused heavily on emphasising that her company would do what it said and previously struggled with: turn out better products on time.
That discipline helped AMD first win back creditability and then big customers. Now she finds herself more likely to agree with her rival’s lofty pronouncements. Su is predicting that the market for AI chips will grow at an annual 60% clip and total $500-billion in 2028. That will make one product category roughly the same size as the whole industry right now.
Everywhere
That means there’s plenty of room for growth for everyone who, in Su’s catchphrase, makes “great products”. And it means that unlike in the past, AMD’s relatively modest resources won’t be an impediment.
“We’ve always been in this place where we haven’t necessarily had the same amount of people that other larger companies have, but we’ve certainly punched well above our weight in certain terms of technology capability, in terms of impact on the industry,” she says. “The most exciting part of the computing industry is, how do you enable AI? And our view is AI is going to be everywhere. AI is going to be in every application, every product, everywhere you go, you’re going to need computing. And we’re at that place right now.” — Ian King and Emily Chang, with Lauren Ellis, (c) 2024 Bloomberg LP
