Lisa Su

Su was born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1969 and moved to the United States at three, growing up in Queens in a household where her father worked as a statistician for New York City government and her mother, an accountant, later became an entrepreneur. She took apart her brother's radio-controlled car as a child to understand how it worked and more or less never stopped. After Bronx High School of Science, she went to MIT and stayed for eight years, earning a bachelor's, a master's and, in 1994, a doctorate in electrical engineering, with a dissertation on silicon-on-insulator transistors, a manufacturing technique that would shape chipmaking for the next two decades.

She spent thirteen years at IBM, helping develop the copper-interconnect process that made chips faster, then two as chief technology officer at Freescale before joining AMD as a senior vice president in 2012. AMD named her CEO on October 8, 2014, when the company was worth about two billion dollars and losing ground to both Intel and Nvidia. Su cut product lines, bet what research budget remained on a new architecture called Zen, and won contracts putting AMD chips inside the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Zen shipped in 2017, and AMD's market value passed Intel's by 2019 and reached roughly 700 billion dollars by 2026, after a 49-billion-dollar acquisition of the chipmaker Xilinx in 2022 and Su's addition of the AMD chairmanship. In October 2025 AMD agreed to supply OpenAI with six gigawatts of chips.

The rebuild that made her famous started with cuts: AMD shed jobs and abandoned entire product categories in Su's first two years so it could fund one bet, the Zen architecture, and if that chip had underperformed the company likely would not have survived to become what it is now. She rarely discusses her family beyond acknowledging she is a first cousin, once removed, of Nvidia's Jensen Huang. The two grew up unaware of the connection and now run rival companies fighting over the same AI data-center market, a coincidence journalists find irresistible and Su treats as mostly beside the point. In 2019 she became the first woman to top an annual survey of S&P 500 CEO pay, at 58.5 million dollars, a figure that drew its own scrutiny of what a turnaround is worth.

AMD's turnaround under Su reads close to settled history at this point: the company she took over near collapse is now worth hundreds of billions and genuinely competes with both Intel and Nvidia, which few analysts expected in 2014. What is not settled is the next chapter, whether AMD's AI chips can take real share from Nvidia's still-overwhelming lead, and how much of Su's reputation rests on a rivalry with her own cousin that investors in both companies watch as closely as any product roadmap. The record so far argues for her. The scoreboard that will actually decide it is still running.

Lisa Su's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Copper interconnect process invention
  Developed at IBM, making chips up to 20 percent faster 1998
• Cell microprocessor invention
  Co-developed at IBM with Sony and Toshiba for the PlayStation 3 2005
• Zen microarchitecture invention
  The chip bet that reversed AMD's decline against Intel 2017
• Xilinx acquisition company
  49-billion-dollar deal, AMD's largest, adding programmable chips to its lineup 2022
• Instinct MI300 series invention
  AMD's answer to Nvidia's AI-training chips 2023

• November 7, 1969 aged 0 Born in Tainan, Taiwan
• 1972 aged ~3 Moves to the United States at age three, settling in Queens, New York
• 1994 aged ~25 Earns a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT Her dissertation covered silicon-on-insulator transistors.
• January 2012 aged 42 Joins AMD as senior vice president and general manager
• October 8, 2014 aged 44 Named CEO of AMD, then worth about two billion dollars
• 2017 aged ~48 Ships the Zen microarchitecture, reversing AMD's decline
• February 2022 aged 52 Closes the 49-billion-dollar Xilinx acquisition and becomes AMD chair
• October 6, 2025 aged 55 AMD and OpenAI announce a deal to deploy six gigawatts of AMD GPUs

• Jensen Huang b. 1963
  Co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA whose GPUs became the engine of the AI revolution. first cousin once removed of
• Sam Altman b. 1985
  Technology executive and investor whose leadership in generative artificial intelligence has had major but still-unsettled historical consequences. signed a multi-gigawatt chip deal with
• Satya Nadella b. 1967
  CEO of Microsoft who pivoted the company toward cloud computing and AI, driving massive growth. sells AI chips to
• Mark Zuckerberg b. 1984
  Co-founder of Facebook who built the world's largest social media platform and reshaped global communication. sells AI chips to
• Gordon Moore 1929–2023
  Co-founder of Intel whose observation became Moore's Law, driving decades of semiconductor progress. cites as a formative influence