Meet Lisa Su, Jensen Huang's cousin, who's CEO of Nvidia rival AMD

Lisa Tzwu-Fang Su was delivered in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1969, to Su Chun-hwai and Sandy Lo. Her family immigrated to the US whenever she was about 3 since her father, a statistician, was following his alumnus studies at the University of Texas in Austin. At that time, her mother was an accountant. The family eventually settled downward in Queens, New York City.

As a child, Su liked to obtain distinct and rebuild remote-controlled cars and another gadgets, which sparked her involvement in engineering. She eventually attended The Bronx High School of Science and graduated in 1986.

Su attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston for many years and focused on electric engineering. She eventually completed her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees all at MIT throughout the 1990s.

Su's doctoral activity on MOSFETs — small digital switches inner device chips — helped cement her forthcoming in several of the world's best-known semiconductor companies.

After leaving academia, Su worked in engineering, research, and managerial roles at Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor.

As the guide researcher at the IBM Semiconductor R&D Center, she contributed to the betterment of copper interconnects in chips, replacing aluminum ones. Her afterward function as elder vice chairman and broad director at Freescale, anywhere she prepared the business for its IPO, gave Su the cognition she needed to obtain on roles beyond research.

Su joined AMD in 2012 as the broad director of Global Business Units. AMD's market cap that twelvemonth was a small little than $2 billion.

At that time, most of AMD's income came from traditional chips for PCs. However, the PC market was shrinking in the first 2010s during petition for smartphones and tablets was booming.

AMD began adopting a "semi-custom" approach, modifying its center technologies to encounter idiosyncratic client needs. This method helped safe contracts to scheme and industry chips for Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One, which reduced reliance on the PC market.

In October 2014, Su was promoted to rotate into President and CEO of AMD.

In 2014, AMD had a ample but scattered portfolio of chips for PCs, embedded systems, graphics, and low-power mobile, but the deficiency of concentration was causing the business to endure market portion to Nvidia and Intel.

In a alter of direction for the company, Su decided to discard the market of low-power chips alongside small margins to concentration on producing high-end chips for the cloud, data centers, and consoles.

The betterment of the Ryzen chips helped revive its market portion among person products, during the simultaneous initiate of the EPYC processor chips helped carve out its portion among data centers and servers. Companies alongside elevated petition for haze services, specified as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Cloud, have all been adopting EPYC chips.

In 2018, AMD additionally launched the world's archetypal 7-nanometer data center GPUs, namely the Radeon Instinct MI50 and MI60.

By 2020, AMD's market cap had reached complete $110 billion.

Before Su started gracing mag covers, she went viral in a clip from the 2018 Chinese Grand Prix, anywhere Formula 1 commentator Martin Brundle yelled, "Excuse me, Ma'am, do you conversation English?" at the CEO, who was sponsoring the event.

"I'm alongside AMD," Su said, a reply that immediately gained her the net position of being humble. The first clip on YouTube has garnered additional than 750,000 views and continues to dispersed on Instagram Reels as an example of humility.

In 2022, Su became the archetypal MIT alum to create a current for a construction that volition withstand her own name. Originally called Building 12, the residence of MIT.nano was renamed the Lisa T. Su Building.

Su additionally regularly appears at MIT's doctoral commencement ceremonies and established the Lisa Su Fellowship Fund, which supports female alumnus students at MIT who have made accomplishments in nanotechnology.

AMD's endeavor has grown additional than a hundred times since Su took the wheel, although it is motionless a fraction of the size of the nearly $4 trillion Nvidia.

When asked if she thinks she could outcompete Nvidia, Su told Wired in an discussion final twelvemonth that she doesn't necessarily desire to be compared to Intel and Nvidia, since "the market is humongous" and she sees plentifulness of opportunities.

Last year, Intel and Nvidia announced a strategic collaboration to create AI infrastructure and individual computing products, sending Intel shares up 23% as of market near that day and denting AMD's stock. The collaboration is anticipated to create important force on AMD by combining Nvidia's AI ability alongside Intel's hardware.

In March 2025, a squad of analysts from SemiAnalysis published a study stating that AMD's graphics handling unit is motionless lesser to Nvidia's since AMD's existing application prevents the part from reaching its complete potential.

Su was not angry. Instead, she hopped on a 90-minute call alongside SemiAnalysis's guide expert the next day to comprehend him out.

"Feedback is a current equal whenever it's critical," Su wrote in a article on X following the call, "We have put a ton of activity into client and workload optimizations, but there is many additional we can do to allow the broad ecosystem."

Similar to Nvidia's H20 chips, AMD has developed chips specifically for the Chinese market in reply to former US export authority regulations, namely the MI308 AI chips.

In April 2025, AMD estimated it would obtain an $800 myriad income hit following Trump announced additional stringent part export controls that would forestall MI308 from reaching its intended market.

"We guide today since we have the finest technology. However, if we're not capable to completely have our innovation adopted in the remainder of the world, there volition be other technologies that volition arrive to play," stated Su in a US Senate hearing in May 2025 concerning export controls. "They may not be as fine as we are today, but frankly, use really spurs innovation."

In July 2025, the limitation was lifted, and AMD stated it would resume compliant shipments to China. By September 2025, the two Nvidia and AMD accepted to portion 15% of their revenues from chip revenue to China alongside the US government, in toggle for maintaining their export licenses.

In September 2025, Su attended an AI project power gathering at the White House, led by archetypal female Melania Trump, and subsequently attended a dinner event hosted by Trump alongside several of the biggest names in tech, including Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Su had earlier endorsed the Trump administration's AI Action Plan, although she was not a associate of a ceremonial advisory board. In a September 2025 discussion alongside Fox Business, Su stated the AI Action Plan is an "excellent blueprint for what it takes for America to lead."

The AI Action Plan has faced criticism for attempting to override state-level AI governance and withholding AI infrastructure backing from states alongside additional stringent regulations.

In October 2025, AMD announced it had accepted to a multi-billion-dollar alliance to provision its synthetic intellect chips to OpenAI.

The move gives AMD a important boost against Nvidia.

The multi-year deal, announced Monday, volition see OpenAI deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs.

It gives OpenAI the chance to obtain a approximately 10% interest in AMD, alongside shares vesting as the companies hit deployment targets and AMD hits portion cost targets.

"This alliance is a important stage in construction the compute capability needed to acknowledge AI's complete potential," Sam Altman, cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, said.