Meet Lisa Su: CEO and president of Advanced Micro Devices, the main competitor to Nvidia (www.businessinsider.com)

Lisa Su, CEO and president of AMD, is credited with turning the company from a sub-$2 billion remnant in 2012 into a roughly $270 billion competitor to Nvidia and Intel by 2025. Under her engineering-led strategy AMD prioritized high-performance CPUs and data‑center GPUs—Ryzen for consumers and EPYC for servers—won key cloud customers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google) and launched the 7‑nm Radeon Instinct MI50/MI60 datacenter GPUs. Su also used a semi‑custom approach to win console business (PlayStation, Xbox), stabilizing revenue while refocusing AMD away from low‑margin mobile chips. For the AI/ML community, AMD’s rise matters because it expands choices for AI compute and shapes pricing, standards, and software support. Technical implications include growing EPYC adoption in hyperscalers, continued pressure on AMD to close software and driver gaps highlighted by analysts (which Su addressed directly), and geopolitical supply risks: export restrictions to China temporarily cut expected revenue by ~$800M and led to new licensing arrangements that effectively share a portion of China sales revenue with the U.S. government. Nvidia’s dominant AI stack and a recent Intel–Nvidia collaboration pose competitive pressure, but AMD’s hardware roadmap and Su’s engineering leadership keep it a consequential alternative for AI infrastructure and workload optimization.