NEAR BANKRUPTCY TO BILLIONS THE LISA SU STORY
On 8th October 2014, when Lisa Su assumed leadership of AMD as CEO, the company’s stock price was running at US$3.25. Just over six years later, on 29th November 2021, AMD’s stock hit US$164. That’s an increase of 4,946 percent.
So, who is the woman behind AMD’s revival? Born in 1969, Su came to the US from Taiwan aged just three. As a young girl, her statistician father and accountant mother schooled her in the way of numbers. By 10 years old, her engineering instincts had her rebuilding remote control cars and it seemed her destiny to enroll, as she did, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the fall of 1986 to study electrical engineering.
From the very start, those student days set the tone for her future role at AMD. In her freshman year, she spent time as a research assistant helping with the manufacture of test silicon wafers for grad students. Part of her doctorate research at MIT involved some of the earliest work on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology, a then unproven method of improving chip efficiency that is now industry standard.
Out of MIT, Su joined Texas Instruments and then, shortly afterward, moved to IBM, where she pioneered the replacement of aluminum connectors with copper, resulting in chips that were 20 percent faster. In 2000, Su was given a year-long assignment as technical assistant to IBM CEO Lou Gerstner before being appointed head and founder of IBM’s Emerging Products division.
During that period, Sony CEO Ken Kutaragi commissioned Su’s group at IBM with a collaboration charged with
“improving the performance of game machine processors by a factor of 1,000.” The result was the ground-breaking nine-processor chip that became the Cell CPU in the Sony PlayStation 3.
By 2007, Su had moved on to become CTO of Freescale heading up R&D and helping the company to float on the stock market in 2011. But it was in 2012 that she finally joined AMD as general manager, her early work included a key role in collaborating with Microsoft and Sony on console chips. It was only two and a half years later that Su was appointed CEO of AMD and the rest, as they say, is history. Or rather very much an ongoing success story.