While the world fixates on Nvidia's meteoric rise, Lisa Su has quietly orchestrated one of the most remarkable turnarounds in tech history.
As CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), she's transformed a struggling underdog—once teetering on the brink of bankruptcy — into a powerhouse worth nearly $300 billion. Under her leadership, AMD's market capitalization has skyrocketed from around $2 billion in 2014 to over $250 billion by mid-2025, with recent surges pushing it toward the $300 billion mark. This isn't just financial wizardry; it's a story of bold innovation, strategic partnerships, and an unyielding focus on high-performance computing that's positioning AMD to challenge the AI giants.
From Near-Collapse to Chip Dominance
When Lisa Su ascended to AMD's CEO role in October 2014, the company was in dire straits. Stock prices hovered around $3 per share, burdened by billions in debt and overshadowed by Intel's stranglehold on the CPU market. Su, a Taiwanese-American electrical engineer with a PhD from MIT and stints at IBM and Texas Instruments, inherited a firm that had slashed 25% of its workforce and was bleeding talent. Her three-pronged strategy — delivering only high-quality products, rebuilding customer trust, and streamlining operations — seemed straightforward but demanded radical change.
Su bet big on AMD's core strengths: processors for data centers, gaming, and emerging tech. The launch of the Zen architecture in 2017 marked the inflection point, surging AMD's CPU market share to nearly 11% and earning rave reviews for Ryzen chips that offered Intel-beating performance at lower prices. By 2022, AMD had eclipsed Intel in both revenue and market value, a feat amplified by the $49 billion acquisition of Xilinx in 2022, bolstering AMD's FPGA and AI capabilities. Today, AMD powers millions of gamers via Xbox and PlayStation consoles and dominates in supercomputing, fueling five of the world's top 10 supercomputers.
AI Ambitions: Eyeing a $500 Billion Prize
As Nvidia basks in the AI spotlight, Su has maneuvered AMD into the fray with surgical precision. The company's Instinct MI300X accelerators, launched in late 2023, are now deployed at scale by cloud giants, serving models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta's Llama to millions of users daily. Su's vision? Capture a massive slice of the AI market, which she forecasts will exceed $500 billion by 2028 — growing over 60% annually from $45 billion in 2023, driven by inference workloads rather than just training.
Strategic alliances are AMD's secret weapon. Seven of the top 10 AI model builders, including OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI, run production workloads on AMD hardware. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly praised the partnership, calling early designs for the MI400 series "amazing" and highlighting co-development for LLM-optimized chips.
Meta deploys MI300X for all live traffic on Llama 405B and plans deeper ties with the MI400 platform, while Google leverages AMD EPYC processors for its AI Hypercomputer. These collaborations aren't just endorsements — they're revenue engines, with AMD's data center business doubling to $12.6 billion in 2024.
Su, a self-described "pragmatic technology optimist," views AI's scale as tied to human ingenuity: "AI is as big as the people who create it." She's betting on open ecosystems, like the ROCm software stack, to foster innovation and erode Nvidia's moat. With MI350 series chips offering 35 times the performance of predecessors and Helios rack-scale solutions launching in 2026, AMD aims for leadership in price-performance-per-watt, targeting $5 billion in AI chip sales for 2025 alone.
A Personal Crusade: AI as Healthcare's Game-Changer
Beyond silicon, Su's optimism shines in her passion for societal impact, particularly healthcare—a "personal crusade" born from her engineering ethos. She sees modern medicine as a "travesty" of disjointed knowledge: specialists siloed in organs like hearts or kidneys, lacking holistic integration. AI, in her view, can "turn the art of medicine into a science" by unifying data from drug discovery to patient care, accelerating diagnoses and eliminating trial-and-error.
"We should be able to cure diseases without trial and error. This is a perfect use case for AI," Su has said, envisioning systems that connect research, therapeutics, and outcomes to improve millions of lives. At events like CES 2026, she'll keynote on AI's world-altering potential, emphasizing productivity, sustainability, and life sciences. For Su, technology isn't just profitable — it's purposeful, enhancing human capability without replacing it.
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The Road Ahead: No One-Size-Fits-All
Lisa Su's decade at AMD proves that in tech, underdogs can roar. From a $2 billion also-ran to a $300 billion contender, her leadership has reasserted AMD as a force in CPUs, GPUs, and AI. As the industry eyes trillion-dollar AI horizons, Su's focus on broad portfolios — "the best CPUs, the best AI accelerators" — positions AMD to thrive in a multipolar world. Nvidia may lead today, but Su's playbook of risk-taking, partnerships, and relentless execution suggests the race is far from over. In her words, "The biggest risk is not taking any risk." AMD, under Su, is all in.
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*Target audience: Tech investors, AI enthusiasts, and business leaders interested in semiconductor innovation.*
