Lisa Su named CEO of the Year by TIME, AMD emerges as key player in chip industry

Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), has been recognised as the CEO of the Year by TIME magazine, an honour that proves her extraordinary leadership in the semiconductor industry.

Under Su’s leadership, AMD evolved from an emerging company in an extremely competitive market with giants like Nvidia and Intel to a dominant player in the semiconductor industry. Su’s achievement comes at a time when the semiconductor sector is all the rage, witnessing a surge driven by advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and graphics processing units (GPUs).

Who is Lisa Su?

Su was born in Taiwan and was raised in New York. Drawn to engineering from an early age with a deep passion for technology, she did her PhD in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Su spent the initial few years of her career at Texas Instruments and IBM, which shaped her understanding of business and technology.

She took charge of AMD in 2014 when the company was in deep financial turmoil. Its stock had plummeted to around $3 per share, as per a report by Bloomberg. Many analysts expected AMD to fade from the industry quickly, considering that its share in the data-center chip market saw a concerning fall.

AMD’s transformation

Under Su’s leadership, AMD transformed its strategy, emphasising innovation and focusing on developing high-performance processors for consumers and enterprises both. Su’s first major breakthrough was in 2017 when the company introduced its Zen chips—processors that offered exceptional speed and efficiency. This marked the beginning of AMD’s comeback in the market. Its market share in the cloud-CPU space started rising gradually, and its stock price skyrocketed from $3 to nearly $140 today, marking a jump of nearly 50 times, as per the TIME report. The company’s current market share in cloud-CPU space is 34%. In 2022, it surpassed Intel in terms of market value for the first time.

Today, AMD’s market capitalisation is approximately $207 billion, while Intel's is nearly $87 billion. While AMD’s share in AI data centre GPUs has increased substantially in 2024, and Su’s visionary leadership is driving it further, the company still faces several challenges in the market and tough competition from industry giants like Nvidia, which leads the AI data-center GPU market with a 95% share as of 2024.