Lisa Su, 57, CEO of Santa Clara chipmaker AMD, still runs toward the hardest problems

Lisa Su lost her voice the week she was to give MIT’s commencement address. She gave it anyway.

“I’ve given a lot of talks over the years … but this one is personal,” the chair and CEO of AMD told the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Class of 2026 on May 28. She asked them to bear with her “if my voice sounds a little rough.” She told them about a 17-year-old who had arrived on campus in the fall of 1986, “born in Taiwan, raised in Queens … and pretty sure I was good at math.”

“Then I walked into 6.001 and 6.002,” she said, naming two of MIT’s introductory electrical engineering and computer science courses. “Within about two weeks, I realized there were a lot of people at MIT who were very, very good at math.”

Su is 57. She has run Advanced Micro Devices, the Santa Clara chipmaker, since October 2014. Last month the president gave her the National Medal of Science, the country’s highest honor for scientists and engineers. Last week AMD reported the largest and most profitable quarter in its history.

Queens, the Bronx and a remote-control car

Su was born Nov. 7, 1969, in Tainan, Taiwan, and came to New York with her parents at 3. Her father was a mathematician; her mother was a bookkeeper who became an entrepreneur. She grew up in Queens and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1986.

As a girl, she took apart her brother’s remote-control cars and put them back together. “I just had a great curiosity about how things worked,” she has said.

At MIT she chose electrical engineering because, she has recalled, it seemed like the most difficult major. The first all-nighters came freshman year. “It was a new experience, but it was a lot of fun doing it together with your classmates,” she said.

The clean room

The turn came in a lab. Through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, she went to work in Professor Hank Smith’s lab in Building 39, making X-ray lithography mask blanks for a graduate student.

“To be clear, at the time I had absolutely no idea what that actually meant,” she told the graduates. “But I got to put on my first bunny suit, walk into the clean room, and start building devices on little 2-inch wafers.”

Most of the experiments didn’t work the way the team expected. They adjusted and tried again. “It was the coolest thing ever,” she said. “I remember thinking: wow, we can build things this small? Things tiny enough to fit on a die the size of a coin … but powerful enough to change the world. And that is when I fell in love with semiconductors.”

She stayed for a master’s degree in 1991 and a doctorate in 1994 under Professor Dimitri Antoniadis, working on silicon-on-insulator transistors, then an unproven way to make transistors more efficient. She would fabricate devices for weeks, find they didn’t behave as expected and walk back to Antoniadis’ office to plan the next try.

“Little by little, I went from a new grad student learning about the field … to someone doing original research,” she said. “And along the way, I started believing in myself. Not the confidence that I would always know the answer. But the confidence that even when I didn’t know the answer yet … I could figure it out.”

The lab work outlasted her. For years after she graduated, MIT students learning to use the shared nanofabrication tools followed the recipes she wrote as a doctoral student, MIT.nano’s founding director, Vladimir Bulović, has said.

‘Run toward the hardest problems’

After a few months at Texas Instruments, Su joined IBM in 1995. She was 25 and one of hundreds of thousands of employees.

“I learned something important very quickly: engineering doesn’t care how old you are,” she said. “It cares whether your ideas work.” A mentor there gave her what she calls the best advice she ever received: “Run toward the hardest problems.”

She spent 13 years at IBM. She played a key role in developing the method for using copper instead of aluminum to wire chips, which IBM brought to market in 1998. She spent a year as technical assistant to CEO Lou Gerstner, then started an emerging-products group. “I was basically director of myself,” she once said. “There was no one else in the group.” That group worked with Sony and Toshiba on the Cell processor that later powered the PlayStation 3. She rose to vice president of IBM’s Semiconductor Research and Development Center.

In 2007 she joined Freescale Semiconductor as chief technology officer and later ran its networking and multimedia business.

The dream job

Su joined AMD in January 2012 as a senior vice president, became chief operating officer and was named CEO in October 2014. AMD had been through tough years, and some of her mentors thought taking the job was risky.

“But for me, this was my dream job,” she said. “This was what I’d been training for all those years.”

Her first task, she said, was to decide “what we wanted to be when we grew up.” AMD bet that high-performance computing would be the most important technology of the future. The company built Ryzen chips for PCs, EPYC chips for servers and Instinct accelerators for artificial intelligence. She added the title of board chair in 2022.

She calls the skill that got AMD through it “the engineer’s instinct”: “the ability to face what seemed like an unsolvable problem, break it down, and methodically work through it step by step.” She said she learned at AMD that the instinct is even stronger when a whole team shares it. “The greatest satisfaction of my career has been bringing people together to do something more than any of us thought was possible.”

On the latest TOP500 list, from June, AMD processors power the world’s second-fastest supercomputer, El Capitan, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, and the third-fastest, Frontier, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

In the three months that ended in September, AMD’s revenue rose 45% from a year earlier to $13.4 billion. Data center sales nearly doubled, to a record $8.5 billion. “Adoption is just starting,” she told investors on Nov. 3, speaking of AI agents, “and we expect demand to grow sharply.” On Nov. 9, after Google announced its new TPU 8tx systems, Su posted on X that AMD’s EPYC would be their host processor. “We’re proud to partner with you,” she wrote.

A building with her name on it

Su has never really left MIT. She served 10 years on the visiting committee for its electrical engineering and computer science department. In 2018 she started the Lisa Su Fellowship Fund for women graduate students working in nanotechnology. In 2022 MIT named Building 12, home of MIT.nano, the Lisa T. Su Building. She was the first MIT alumna to make a gift for a building that bears her own name.

“There is no substitute for hands-on learning,” she said then. “My hope is that MIT.nano will enable and develop the best and brightest technologists and innovators in the future.”

The honors keep coming. She was the first woman to win the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal, IEEE’s highest semiconductor honor. TIME named her its 2024 CEO of the Year. She belongs to the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, chairs the Semiconductor Industry Association’s board and serves on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. On Oct. 8 she received the National Medal of Science in Washington. Congress created the award in 1959; past winners include Richard Feynman and Barbara McClintock.

Race weekends and a lucky career

Su and her husband, Daniel Lin, are based in Austin, Texas. Her posts on X show a fan’s side. AMD is a partner of the Mercedes Formula 1 team, and on Oct. 21 its driver Kimi Antonelli stopped by the office before the U.S. Grand Prix in Austin. “We’ll be cheering for you at the track this weekend!” she posted. He won. “Wonderful day at the track!” she wrote. When he clinched the world championship on Nov. 1, she posted, “World Champion!!”

For all the awards, she talks about luck. “I am fortunate to have great parents,” she told the MIT graduates. “I received an extraordinary education. I have had the chance to work with great people. But I also believe I’ve been very lucky in my career.”

Her advice is to make your own. “Luck is not just being in the right place at the right time,” she said. “It is taking the risk to work on something hard.”

She is most excited about what AI could do for medicine. “We’ve all experienced firsthand what it feels like when someone you love is sick,” she said. AI, she said, can help doctors bring the world’s best knowledge to each patient. “It does not replace people. It makes each of us more capable.”

And she wants the people using it to stay in charge. “Technology itself does not decide what the future looks like,” she said. “People do.”

She closed with a reminder. “Somewhere in the years ahead, you’re going to walk into another room where you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing,” she said. “You’ve done this before. Go figure it out.”

Source: AMD; MIT; TOP500; Lisa Su on X; Forbes profile.