When Lisa Su became its CEO Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) ten years ago, it hardly looked like a multi-billion dollar company.
AMD stock weakened by about $3 per share. The company had cut about 25% of its workforce, according to Time. But under Su's leadership, the chip maker has thrived: Today, AMD has a market cap of $205.95 billion and its stock trades at about $127 per share.
Su was named Time's CEO of the Year for 2024 on Tuesday, and the 55-year-old's net worth has soared alongside AMD's success — up to $1.3 billion, Forbes considered in April. For comparison, Su received a base salary of $1 million and a performance-based bonus of $1.2 million in 2014 when she took over as CEO, the Seattle Times reported in 2020.
Born in Taiwan, Su immigrated to the US with her parents at age 3 so her father, a mathematician, could attend graduate school in New York. Growing up, “my dad used to quiz me with math tables at the dining room table,” she said. Forbes Last year. “That's how I got into math in the first place.”
Su was initially not interested in following in her father's footsteps into a STEM career. As a teenager, she dreamed of becoming a concert pianist, she said: “I wasn't good enough to do that, so I became an engineer.
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She earned bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and spent her early career working in various roles at Texas Instruments and IBM in the 1990s – both large tech companies, at the time that.
“I was very lucky early in my career,” Su told Time. “Every two years, I did something else.”
In 2012, Su was hired at AMD as senior vice president and general manager of the company's global business units, according to her LinkedIn profile. Two years later, she ascended to the position of CEO, becoming the first woman to lead AMD since the company was founded in 1969.
“I felt like I was training for an opportunity to do something meaningful in the semiconductor industry,” she said. “And AMD was my vision.”
Playing the long game
Su is one of the few Fortune 500 CEOs with a PhD. Her engineering background helped spearhead some of the technological innovations — including a new, faster CPU chip for computers — that have fueled AMD's recent success.
Friends and colleagues describe her as “a shrewd strategist,” and she sometimes is holding meetings on weekends and expecting employees to work after midnightreported time. Her high expectations may pose a challenge to AMD's long-term survival, tech industry analyst and former AMD executive Patrick Moorhead told the magazine.
That could be by design: “I don't believe leaders are born. I believe leaders are trained,” Su said.
When he became CEO, Su promoted a three-pronged plan to help AMD compete with rivals Intel and NvidiaTime reported: sell only high-quality products, deepening customer trust and simplifying the company's operations. The long-term plan took time to pay dividends, but in 2022, AMD passed Intel in market value and annual revenue.
On the other hand, Nvidia is not the largest chip maker in the world – it it recently passed Apple as the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. But Su measures success in decades, not quarters, she said.
Su said. “The thing about our business is, everything takes time.”
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