Lisa Su: The Engineer Who Rebuilt AMD, From Queens to the Top of the Chip Industry
Lisa Su speaking at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, in March 2024. Photo: Fuzheado / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
Lisa Su has run Advanced Micro Devices, the Santa Clara, California, chipmaker better known as AMD, since October 2014. She took the job when the company was well behind its larger rival Intel. Over the years that followed she moved AMD into new markets and, in 2022, added the title of chair.
Su was born Lisa Tzwu-Fang Su on Nov. 7, 1969, in Tainan, Taiwan. Her family moved to the United States when she was 3, and she grew up in Queens, New York City. Her father, Su Chun-hwai, worked as a statistician for the city government. Her mother, Sandy Lo, was an accountant who later started a business. Su is married to Daniel Lin, and the couple lives in Austin, Texas.
From Queens to MIT
Su graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1986 and went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that fall to study electrical engineering. She stayed for the full run: a bachelor’s degree, a master’s in 1991 and a doctorate in 1994. Her dissertation dealt with silicon-on-insulator transistors. Her advisers were Dimitri Antoniadis and James Chung.
Her first job out of school was at Texas Instruments, where she spent 1994 and 1995 as a technical staff member. She then moved to IBM, where she stayed until 2007. As a research staff member she worked on device physics and helped develop copper interconnect technology, which IBM launched in 1998. She later led the company’s Emerging Products division, whose work fed into the Cell processor used in the PlayStation 3, and became a vice president of IBM’s semiconductor research and development center. She left in May 2007.
Next came Freescale Semiconductor. She served as chief technology officer from June 2007 to August 2009, then ran the company’s networking and multimedia group until December 2011.
AMD
Su joined AMD in January 2012 as a senior vice president and general manager. Her early push was to widen the company’s reach beyond personal computers, including chips for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 game consoles. In October 2014 she was named president and chief executive, succeeding Rory Read.
The turnaround rested heavily on a processor design called Zen. When Zen-based Ryzen chips arrived in 2017, reviewers praised their high thread counts and prices that undercut Intel’s. AMD’s share of the processor market climbed to nearly 11 percent after the launch.
In February 2022 AMD closed its acquisition of Xilinx, a deal valued at roughly $49 billion, and Su became chair of the board.
Pay and recognition
Su’s compensation drew national attention in 2019, when her pay of about $58.5 million made her the highest-paid chief executive in the S&P 500 and, in the Associated Press’s annual survey, the first woman to top that list. Her 2023 total compensation was about $30.3 million.
Her honors include election as an IEEE Fellow in 2009 and to the National Academy of Engineering in 2018. In 2021 she became the first woman to receive the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal. Time named her its CEO of the Year in 2014 and again in 2024. President Joe Biden appointed her to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in 2021. In 2022, MIT named Building 12, home of the MIT.nano research facility, after her.
Su has one family tie in the same industry. Her mother and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang are first cousins.
Source: Wikipedia, “Lisa Su.”
