Born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1969 and raised in New York, Lisa Su earned her doctorate in electrical engineering from MIT and built her early career in semiconductor research at Texas Instruments, IBM and Freescale. She joined AMD in 2012 and was named chief executive in 2014, inheriting a company that was widely considered a fading second-tier player.
Under her leadership AMD bet aggressively on a chiplet-based Zen architecture, recaptured technical leadership in server and PC processors, completed the strategic acquisition of Xilinx and built a credible position in AI accelerators with the Instinct line. The company's market value has multiplied many times over during her tenure, and AMD now competes head-on with both Intel in data-center CPUs and NVIDIA in AI silicon.
Su is also the chair of the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and one of the most senior voices on industrial policy for semiconductors, supply-chain resilience and the workforce required to operate advanced fabrication ecosystems.