How AMD CEO Lisa Su Rebuilt a Failing Chipmaker and Grew to become a Billionaire

When Lisa Su turned CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) ten years in the past, it hardly seemed like a multi-billion greenback firm.

AMD inventory was stagnating round $3 per share. The corporate has lower round 25% of its workforce, depending on the weather. However underneath Su’s management, the chipmaker prospered: immediately, AMD has a market capitalization of $205.95 billion and its shares commerce at round $127 per share.

Su was named Time’s 2024 CEO of the 12 months on Tuesday, and the 55-year-old’s internet value has soared alongside AMD’s success, as much as $1.3 billion. Forbes estimated in April. For comparability, Su acquired a base wage of $1 million and a performance-based bonus of $1.2 million in 2014 when she took over as CEO of the corporate. Seattle Times reported in 2020.

Born in Taiwan, Su immigrated to the US along with her mother and father at age 3 in order that her father, a mathematician, might attend graduate faculty in New York. Rising up, “my dad would ask me questions with math tables on the eating room desk,” she stated. Forbes final 12 months. “That’s how I bought into arithmetic.”

Su initially wasn’t concerned with following in her father’s footsteps right into a STEM profession. As a youngster, she dreamed of turning into a live performance pianist. She stated: “I wasn’t adequate to try this, so I turned an engineer.”

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She earned bachelor’s, grasp’s, and doctorate levels in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how and spent her early profession working in varied positions at Texas Devices and IBM within the Nineteen Nineties, two main expertise firms at the moment.

“I used to be very fortunate early in my profession,” Su informed Time. “Each two years I did one thing completely different.”

In 2012, Su was employed at AMD as senior vp and normal supervisor of the corporate’s world enterprise items, in accordance with his LinkedIn profile. Two years later, she rose to the function of CEO, turning into the primary girl to guide AMD for the reason that firm’s founding in 1969.

“I felt like I used to be coaching for the chance to do one thing significant within the semiconductor business,” she stated. “And AMD was my probability.”

Su is likely one of the few Fortune 500 CEOs with a doctorate. Her engineering background helped her lead among the technological improvements, together with a brand new, quicker CPU chip for computer systems, that led to AMD’s current success.

Her pals and colleagues describe her as a “savvy strategist,” and he or she holds meetings on weekends and expects employees to work after midnightTime reported. Its excessive expectations could make it tough for folks to outlive long-term at AMD, Patrick Moorhead, a expertise business analyst and former AMD govt, informed the journal.

This is perhaps intentional: “I don’t imagine leaders are born. I imagine leaders are skilled,” Su stated.

Upon turning into CEO, Su promoted a three-pronged plan to assist AMD compete with its rivals. Intel And NvidiaTime reported: promoting solely high-quality merchandise, constructing buyer belief, and simplifying firm operations. The long-term plan took time to bear fruit, however by 2022, AMD has overtaken Intel by way of market worth and annual income.

Nvidia, however, is just not solely the world’s largest chipmaker: it recently overtook Apple as essentially the most useful publicly traded firm on the planet. However Su measures success in a long time, not quarters, she stated.

“Once you put money into a brand new space, it takes 5 to 10 years to essentially construct all of the completely different items,” Su stated. “The issue with our job is that every thing takes time.”

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