When Su became chief executive of Advanced Micro Devices in 2014, the company was nearly $2.5 billion in debt, its stock had dropped to around $1.61, and its market value had fallen below $2 billion. Revenue had increased only once in the previous five years, while rumors of bankruptcy and corporate breakups circulated across the industry.

Despite the turmoil, Su described the role as her dream job. "When you grow up as a tech person — and I spent my career in semiconductors — there aren’t that many large US semiconductor companies. So I was really excited to become CEO," Su told CNN Business in a 2020 interview.

More than a decade later, the 56-year-old executive has turned AMD into one of the world’s biggest AI chipmakers, with a market value of roughly $675 billion and a soaring stock price. "It really is one of the great turnaround stories of modern American business history," Chris Miller, a historian of the semiconductor industry, told Time magazine.

Her success earned her recognition from Time as its 2024 CEO of the Year, making her the first woman to receive the title. She has an estimated net worth of around $2.4 billion as of May 20, according to Forbes.

Lisa Su, CEO of U.S. chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices. Photo courtesy of AMD

From MIT engineer to AMD CEO

Born in Taiwan, Su moved to the U.S. at age three after her family immigrated so her father, a statistician, could attend graduate school. "My father used to quiz me with math tables at the dining room table," she said in a 2023 interview with Forbes. "That’s how I first got into math."

She grew up in New York City and developed an early interest in science and engineering, spending time programming. Her father told Tatler Asia that as a child, Su was fascinated by how things worked and would often take apart toy cars to examine their inner mechanisms.

At Bronx High School of Science, often known for producing leading scientists and researchers, Su found herself surrounded by exceptionally talented classmates. The competitive environment pushed her to excel academically and professionally. She later recalled building a project that simulated a hurricane inside a box using boiling water and observation windows to study the storm effect.

After graduating in 1986, she enrolled at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study electrical engineering because she considered it the most difficult major. She later earned a Ph.D. in the subject. During her freshman year, she began working in a semiconductor research lab. Her doctoral research focused on MOSFETs, tiny switches that control the flow of electricity inside computer chips, helping pave the way for a career in the semiconductor industry.

She spent the first years of her career at Texas Instruments and IBM, two first-wave tech titans, which taught her about how to run a business and manage teams. "I was really lucky early in my career," she said. "Every two years, I did a different thing."

She joined AMD in 2012 as senior vice president and general manager of the company’s global business units. "I felt like I was in training for the opportunity to do something meaningful in the semiconductor industry. And AMD was my shot." Two years later, she became AMD’s first female CEO since the company was founded in 1969.

The promotion came at a difficult time. AMD had cut roughly a quarter of its workforce, sold and leased back offices in Austin, Texas, and spun off its costly chip manufacturing operations as the global PC market weakened. Former AMD executive Patrick Moorhead remembered the company as "deader than dead," he told Forbes.

On her second day as CEO, Su addressed employees during a companywide meeting. "I believe that we can build the best," she told staff. She simplified AMD’s recovery plan into three goals: building stronger products, rebuilding customer trust and streamlining operations. "Three things, just to keep it simple," she said. "Because if it’s five or ten, it’s hard."

One of Su’s biggest strategic decisions was shifting AMD away from lower-margin products and focusing instead on high-performance chips for cloud computing, data centers, AI, and gaming. Those technologies are dominant nowadays but Su had to start laying the groundwork in 2014. Developing advanced semiconductors is a costly and risky process that can take years, requiring companies to predict what technologies customers will demand in the future.

"It is really important when you’re a technology company to decide what you are really, really good at because you have to be the best, number one or number two," Su said. "It’s all about focusing on, ‘Hey, this is the DNA of the company, let us make it as great as possible in terms of what we can bring to the market.’"

Under Su’s leadership, AMD engineers spent years developing the Zen chip architecture, launched in 2017, which helped the company regain competitiveness against rivals such as Intel and Nvidia. By 2020, AMD processors had become industry leaders in speed and performance, helping the company secure partnerships with organizations including NASA, Microsoft, Meta, Lenovo, Oracle and Dell Technologies. AMD chips were also selected to power two of the world’s most powerful supercomputers: Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

AMD’s AI ambitions accelerated further when the company announced a multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI last Octorber. The agreement will allow OpenAI to deploy six gigawatts of AMD graphics processing units, with the first deployment scheduled for the second half of 2026.

"This partnership is a major step in building the compute capacity needed to realize AI's full potential," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said.

Earlier this month, AMD reported first-quarter earnings that exceeded Wall Street expectations as demand for AI chips continued to surge, according to CNBC. The company forecast second-quarter revenue of about $11.2 billion, above analysts’ estimates of $10.52 billion. AMD’s stock has more than tripled over the past year, including a 66% rise so far in 2026.

Being one of few Fortune 500 CEOs with a PhD, her engineering background has helped her spearhead technological advances at AMD that have driven its success. "I’m an engineer at heart, and I actually spend quite a bit of time with our chief engineers and architects to understand where they think the future is going," Su told Fortune, while adding that as chief exec "some intuition about what you were trying to do is helpful."

Intense leader challenging Nvidia

Su is known for holding weekend meetings and reviewing detailed reports late into the night. When prototype chips arrive from factories, she often personally reviews them in the lab. Whenever Vamsi Boppana give Su updates on AMD’s AI software efforts, she often responds with the same message: "Great job. You need to go faster."

People who have worked with Su describe her as analytical, demanding and intensely focused on execution. "I don’t believe leaders are born. I believe leaders are trained," she told Time.

Su has said difficult challenges are essential for growth. During a commencement speech last year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, she said AMD’s turnaround was not easy, but she approached it head on, drawing inspiration from career advice by IBM executive John Kelly to "run towards the hardest problems."

"Hard problems stretch you, they demand focus, creativity and determination ... They give you confidence, they give you growth and they give you impact," Su told CNBC. "When you choose the hardest challenges, you choose the fastest path to growth and the greatest chance to make a difference."

Su’s work at AMD earned wider recognition in 2024 when Time named her CEO of the Year, making her the first woman to receive the title.

AMD’s business has grown more than a hundredfold since Su took over, but the company remains much smaller than its rival Nvidia, now the world’s most valuable company with a valuation exceeding $5 trillion.

Comparisons between the two companies are heightened by Su’s family connection to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The two are first cousins once removed. Huang’s mother is Su’s grandfather’s sister.

However, with Su growing up in New York while Huang spent part of his childhood in Thailand before moving to Oregon, the two did not meet until later in life.

"We were really distant, so we didn’t grow up together," Su said in an interview with Bloomberg. "We actually met at an industry event. So it wasn’t until we were well into our careers."

When asked whether AMD could outcompete Nvidia, Su told Wired last August that she did not see the industry as a winner-takes-all market because demand for AI chips remained enormous. She argued AMD is catching up. "Without AMD, Nvidia can double their prices," Su said. "Nobody wants to be locked into a proprietary ecosystem. Really our strategy is: let’s invest in an open ecosystem. And then may the best chip win."

Allies say Su is well positioned for the challenge. "We couldn’t have a person better qualified for this job," Jerry Sanders, AMD’s founder and first CE, said. Asked whether Su could one day beat Nvidia, he replied: "Not a question in my mind."