When Lisa Su turned CEO of Superior Micro Gadgets (AMD) a decade in the past, it hardly resembled a multibillion-dollar firm.
AMD inventory was languishing round $3 per share. The corporate had minimize about 25% of its workers, based on Time. However below Su’s management, the chipmaker has flourished: In the present day, AMD has a market cap of $205.95 billion and its inventory trades at roughly $127 per share.
Su was named Time’s CEO of the Yr for 2024 on Tuesday, and the 55-year-old’s web price has soared alongside AMD’s success — as much as $1.3 billion, Forbes estimated in April. For comparability, Su was paid a base wage of $1 million and a performance-based bonus of $1.2 million in 2014 when she took over as CEO, the Seattle Occasions reported in 2020.
Born in Taiwan, Su immigrated to the U.S. together with her dad and mom at age 3 so her father, a mathematician, might attend graduate college in New York. Rising up, “my father used to quiz me with math tables on the eating room desk,” she advised Forbes final 12 months. “That is how I first bought into math.”
Su wasn’t initially desirous about following her father’s footsteps right into a STEM profession. As a young person, she dreamed of turning into a live performance pianist, she mentioned: “I wasn’t ok to try this, so I turned an engineer.”
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She earned bachelor’s, grasp’s and doctoral levels in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how, and spent her early profession working in a wide range of roles at Texas Devices and IBM within the Nineteen Nineties — each big tech corporations, throughout that period.
“I used to be actually fortunate early in my profession,” Su advised Time. “Each two years, I did a unique factor.”
In 2012, Su was employed at AMD as a senior vp and common supervisor of the corporate’s world enterprise models, based on her LinkedIn profile. Two years later, she ascended to the CEO function, turning into the primary girl to guide AMD because the firm’s founding in 1969.
“I felt like I used to be in coaching for the chance to do one thing significant within the semiconductor business,” she mentioned. “And AMD was my shot.”
Enjoying the lengthy sport
Su is certainly one of few Fortune 500 CEOs with a PhD. Her engineering background helped her spearhead among the technological improvements — together with a brand new sooner CPU chip for computer systems — that drove AMD’s latest success.
Pals and colleagues describe her as a “shrewd strategist,” and she or he typically holds conferences on weekends and expects workers to work previous midnight, Time reported. Her excessive expectations could make it difficult for individuals to outlive at AMD long-term, tech business analyst and former AMD govt Patrick Moorhead advised the journal.
That is likely to be by design: “I do not imagine leaders are born. I imagine leaders are educated,” mentioned Su.
Upon turning into CEO, Su promoted a three-part plan to assist AMD compete with rivals Intel and Nvidia, Time reported: promote solely high-quality merchandise, deepen buyer belief and simplify the agency’s operations. The long-term plan took time to pay dividends, however in 2022, AMD surpassed Intel in each market worth and annual income.
Nvidia, however, is not simply the world’s largest chipmaker — it not too long ago overtook Apple because the world’s most respected publicly traded firm. However Su measures success in many years, not quarters, she mentioned.
“Whenever you put money into a brand new space, it’s a five- to 10-year arc to actually construct out the entire varied items,” mentioned Su. “The factor about our enterprise is, all the pieces takes time.”
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