Editor’s note: This story was originally published in October of 2025 and has been updated to reflect Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s resignation.
Lisa Su is the engineer behind one of the most dramatic corporate turnarounds in the tech industry.
The Taiwanese American CEO is widely credited with transforming AMD from a struggling semiconductor firm on the brink of collapse into a global powerhouse competing head-to-head with Intel and Nvidia.
When Su joined AMD in 2012, the company’s market value was under $2 billion. Within a decade of her leadership, AMD’s innovations in high-performance computing and graphics, especially the Ryzen CPUs and EPYC server processors, catapulted the company’s value to over $950 billion as of Thursday.
Su’s leadership has not been without challenges. AMD’s two largest competitors, Nvidia and Intel, are now working together in a strategic collaboration. Under the second Trump administration, export regulations related to China, one of AMD’s largest markets, are also constantly changing.
On Thursday, AMD’s biggest rival Nvidia announced that its CEO Jensen Huang, who is also Su’s cousin, is resigning. As Nvidia searches for a new CEO, some industry observers have floated Su as a possible outside candidate.
AMD’s stock was up 5% on Thursday.
Here’s a look at the timeline of Su’s career, from her early life in New York City to her role as one of the most influential women in tech and innovation:
Early life, family
Lisa Tzwu-Fang Su was born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1969, to Su Chun-hwai and Sandy Lo. Her family immigrated to the US when she was around 3 because her father, a statistician, was pursuing his graduate studies at the University of Texas in Austin. At that time, her mother was an accountant. The family eventually settled down in Queens, New York City.
As a child, Su liked to take apart and rebuild remote-controlled cars and other gadgets, which sparked her interest in engineering. She eventually attended The Bronx High School of Science and graduated in 1986.
Education
Su attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston for many years and focused on electrical engineering. She eventually completed her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees all at MIT throughout the 1990s.
Su’s doctoral work on MOSFETs — tiny electronic switches inside computer chips — helped cement her future in some of the world’s best-known semiconductor companies.
Semiconductor research
After leaving academia, Su worked in engineering, research, and managerial roles at Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor.
As the lead scientist at the IBM Semiconductor R&D Center, she contributed to the development of copper interconnects in chips, replacing aluminum ones. Her later role as senior vice president and general manager at Freescale, where she prepared the company for its IPO, gave Su the experience she needed to take on roles beyond research.
Joining AMD
Su joined AMD in 2012 as the general manager of Global Business Units. AMD’s market cap that year was a little less than $2 billion.
At that time, most of AMD’s revenue came from traditional chips for PCs. However, the PC market was shrinking in the early 2010s while demand for smartphones and tablets was booming.
AMD began adopting a “semi-custom” approach, modifying its core technologies to meet individual customer needs. This approach helped secure contracts to design and manufacture 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 become President and CEO of AMD.
Su is related to her competitor
Su and Huang, former CEO of Nvidia, are actually related. They are first cousins, once removed, with Huang being the elder. Su’s maternal grandfather is the eldest brother of Huang’s mother.
Despite both immigrating to the US from Taiwan as children, they did not grow up together and had never met until well into their respective careers.
On Thursday, Nvidia said Huang had resigned from his role. It follows an extramarital affair scandal and a board investigation into concerns that he may have been the subject of a foreign intelligence effort.
Huang has also previously joked about his rivalry with Su. At an all-hands meeting last year, he recalled how his parents had sent him and his brother to live with an uncle related to Su in the US before they enrolled in a Kentucky reform school, where he was assigned to clean bathrooms.
He blamed the ordeal on Su’s side of the family, saying they’d been “out for blood” since he was nine
“When we give a presentation, the whole market goes up,” he joked. “When she gives a presentation, my stock price goes down.”
The big AMD turnaround
In 2014, AMD had a large but scattered portfolio of chips for PCs, embedded systems, graphics, and low-power mobile, but the lack of focus was causing the company to lose market share to Nvidia and Intel.
In a change of direction for the company, Su decided to discard the market of low-power chips with small margins to focus on producing high-end chips for the cloud, data centers, and consoles.
The development of the Ryzen chips helped revive its market share among consumer products, while the simultaneous launch of the EPYC processor chips helped carve out its share among data centers and servers. Companies with high demand for cloud services, such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Cloud, have all been adopting EPYC chips.
In 2018, AMD also launched the world’s first 7-nanometer data center GPUs, namely the Radeon Instinct MI50 and MI60.
By 2020, AMD’s market cap had reached over $110 billion.
An early viral moment
Before Su started gracing magazine covers, she went viral in a clip from the 2018 Chinese Grand Prix, where Formula 1 commentator Martin Brundle yelled, “Excuse me, Ma’am, do you speak English?” at the CEO, who was sponsoring the event.
“I’m with AMD,” Su said, a response that immediately gained her the internet reputation of being humble. The original clip on YouTube has garnered more than 750,000 views and continues to circulate on Instagram Reels as an example of humility.
Honorary buildings at MIT
In 2022, Su became the first MIT alum to make a gift for a building that will bear her own name. Originally called Building 12, the home of MIT.nano was renamed the Lisa T. Su Building.
Su also regularly appears at MIT’s doctoral commencement ceremonies and established the Lisa Su Fellowship Fund, which supports female graduate students at MIT who have made accomplishments in nanotechnology.
CEO of The Year
Su’s work at AMD was recognized by Time magazine in 2024, which named her CEO of the Year. She became the first woman to receive this title.
Competition with Nvidia
AMD’s business has grown more than a hundred times since Su took the wheel, though it is still 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 interview last year that she doesn’t necessarily want to be compared to Intel and Nvidia, because “the market is humongous” and she sees plenty of opportunities.
Last year, Intel and Nvidia announced a strategic collaboration to develop AI infrastructure and personal computing products, sending Intel shares up 23% as of market close that day and denting AMD’s stock. The collaboration is anticipated to create significant pressure on AMD by combining Nvidia’s AI expertise with Intel’s hardware.
Su’s approach to criticism
In March 2025, a team of analysts from SemiAnalysis published a report stating that AMD’s graphics processing unit is still inferior to Nvidia’s because AMD’s existing software prevents the chip from reaching its full potential.
Su was not angry. Instead, she hopped on a 90-minute call with SemiAnalysis’s lead analyst the next day to hear him out.
“Feedback is a gift even when it’s critical,” Su wrote in a post on X after the call, “We have put a ton of work into customer and workload optimizations, but there is lots more we can do to enable the broad ecosystem.”
Export controls on China
Similar to Nvidia’s H20 chips, AMD has developed chips specifically for the Chinese market in response to past US export control regulations, namely the MI308 AI chips.
In April 2025, AMD estimated it would take an $800 million revenue hit after Trump announced more stringent chip export controls that would prevent MI308 from reaching its intended market.
“We lead today because we have the best technology. However, if we’re not able to fully have our technology adopted in the rest of the world, there will be other technologies that will come to play,” said Su in a US Senate hearing in May 2025 regarding export controls. “They may not be as good as we are today, but frankly, usage really spurs innovation.”
In July 2025, the restriction was lifted, and AMD said it would resume compliant shipments to China. By September 2025, both Nvidia and AMD agreed to share 15% of their revenues from chip sales to China with the US government, in exchange for maintaining their export licenses.
The Rose Garden dinner
In September 2025, Su attended an AI task force meeting at the White House, led by first lady Melania Trump, and subsequently attended a dinner event hosted by Trump alongside some of the biggest names in tech, including Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Su had previously endorsed the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, though she was not a member of a formal advisory board. In a September 2025 interview with Fox Business, Su said 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 funding from states with more stringent regulations.
The OpenAI deal
In October 2025, AMD announced it had agreed to a multi-billion-dollar partnership to supply its artificial intelligence chips to OpenAI.
The move gives AMD a significant boost against Nvidia.
The multi-year deal, announced Monday, will see OpenAI deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs.
It gives OpenAI the opportunity to take a roughly 10% stake in AMD, with shares vesting as the companies hit deployment targets and AMD hits share price targets.
“This partnership is a major step in building the compute capacity needed to realize AI’s full potential,” Sam Altman, cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, said.
White House dinner
In September, Su attended a White House dinner hosted by President Donald Trump for China’s leader, Xi Jinping. She sat with other tech executives, including Huang and Apple chair Tim Cook.
Her marriage to Daniel Lin
Su leads a very private life outside her role at AMD. Her spouse is Daniel Lin, but it is unclear when the pair got married or if they have children. There are no verifiable records of Lin’s profession, and he is not a public figure, though the pair often appear together at public events.
Lisa Su’s downtime
Su told Wired what keeps her going: She boxes with a trainer at her house for exercise, enjoys a good passion tea lemonade from Starbucks, and gets between five and six hours of sleep every night — seven on weekends.
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