Lisa Su - The Woman Who Helped Bring AMD Back to Life

This is the second year Time has made this list. It's to show respect to people who have done important things in the fast-growing field of artificial intelligence (AI). AMD's arificial intelligence efforts have been a key focus under Su's leadership.

Time put the AMD CEO in the "Innovator" group on their list. This shows that she has good ideas and can make them happen well. She has led AMD through some big changes. Since she became the AMD owner in 2014 - the first woman to lead a big company in the semiconductor industry - Su has helped AMD get better when it was having a hard time. She saved the company when it was close to failing.

Su was the first to fix problems by making new products. Business Insider (BI) says she changed AMD's focus from personal computers to high-performance computing, gaming, and AI. This helped the company get back to a good place in the market. AMD events and announcements, like the AMD GPU roadmap reveal and new AMD GPU 2024 launch at the Computex keynote, have generated excitement. AMD is also exploring quantum computing, as highlighted in a recent AMD presentation.

One of her biggest successes was launching the Ryzen chips and Radeon graphics products. These changed things in the tech industry. These products not only helped AMD compete with big rivals like Intel and Nvidia, but also made big improvements in how well they work and their value.

When she took over the company in 2014, AMD's stock price was only about $3. Now, it's $130. This means the company is worth almost $230 billion, adding to Lisa Su's net worth. In the second quarter of 2024, AMD made $5.8 billion, which is 9% more than last year, according to Time.

Even though some people worry that AI might be overhyped or could be a tech bubble, the AMD CEO is sure that AI will be the biggest change in technology. She says, "Every 10 years, we see a big change in technology. It could be the internet, personal computers, mobile phones, or cloud computing. I think AI will be bigger than all of these because of how it really affects our lives, productivity, business, and research."

She says AI will be in all of the company's products. In the next 5 years, she thinks AI will help speed up research and make healthcare better. Especially, even stronger chips in the future will be designed with AI help, leveraging AMD's expertise in generative AI, content creation, and data centers. AMD is partnering with Microsoft on Windows Copilot to enable Copilot PCs focused on energy efficiency.

Lisa Su was born in 1969 in Tainan, Taiwan. She moved to America with her friend when she was only 3 years old. Growing up in Queens, New York, she loved machines and technology from a young age. She often took apart her brother's remote-control cars to see how they worked.

As a child, Lisa was very good at math and science. But her parents wanted her to focus more on art than engineering. They encouraged her to play the piano, which she started at 7 years old. She practiced for many hours every day. Also, she spent 4 hours a day on public transport to go to Bronx High School of Science, one of the best public high schools in America.

When Lisa decided to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), her parents were a bit disappointed. "Maybe my mom wanted me to be a piano player more than an engineer," Lisa said in 2020. "But I didn't get into Juilliard (a famous art school in New York). I got into MIT." Later, she got her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from MIT in the early 1990s. This background would prove invaluable for her future role as the AMD CEO, as detailed in her Lisa Su biography.

Lisa really appreciates her parents for always encouraging her to do her best. "My mom is a big inspiration in my life," she said. "Even though her English wasn't perfect, she ran an import and export business. She connected makers in Taiwan with shipping companies. She built a million-dolar business and was always there for me."

Lisa now runs AMD, a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars. She often travels around the world for work, including AMD launch events focused on AMD CPUs APUs in Taiwan and AMD AI conferences. But when her mother got very sick in 2019, Lisa stayed with her in the hospital for three months.

"Luckily, we got through that hard time," Lisa remembers. "It was an unforgettable experience. I had a great team, and I kept working from the hospital through online meetings. It was a moment when you realize some things are much more important. No one can support your family better than you. No matter who you are, you need to be there when the doctor comes in."

She also said that if she had another life, she would spend time making the healthcare system better.

Looking ahead, the AMD roadmap 2024 is packed with exciting developments. At Computex 2024, AMD unveiled plans for AI PCs powered by its latest Ryzen AI processors. The new Ryzen 9000 series will bring powerful on-device AI capacibilities thanks to dedicated AI accelerators and adaptive computing optimized for AI workloads. The AMD CEO also highlighted the company's Microsoft partnership to enable AI-enabled applications across Windows PCs.

On the server side, AMD announced the Instinct MI300X accelerator, delivering industry-leading NPU performance and efficiency. It combines the next-gen Zen 5 core, RDNA 3.5 graphics, and the new XDNA 2 NPU, a dedicated AI engine offering 8x the peak block FP16 throughput compared to the previous generation. These Strix processors will power the next wave of AI innovation in the cloud and data center.

With Lisa Su at the helm, AMD is poised to cement its position as an AI leader. Through a combination of powerful hardware, close partnerships, and a vision for pervasive AI, the company aims to bring the transformative potential of artificial intelligence to consumers and businesses alike. The next few years will be crucial as AMD competes to define the future of computing in an AI-driven world.

1. "poised to cement its position" means that someone or something is ready or prepared to firmly establish or strengthen their current standing, status, or situation.