When Lisa Su became CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) A decade ago, it barely resembled a multibillion-dollar company.
AMD stock was struggling at around $3 per share. The company laid off 25% of its employees Depending on time. But under Su's leadership, the chip industry has boomed: today, AMD has a market capitalization of… $205.95 billion Its shares are trading at approximately $127 per share.
Su was named Time magazine's CEO of the Year for 2024 on Tuesday, and the 55-year-old's net worth has risen along with AMD's success — to the tune of $1.3 billion. Forbes estimated In April. For comparison, Sue received a base salary of $1 million and a performance-based bonus of $1.2 million in 2014 when she took over as CEO of the company. Seattle Times Reported in 2020.
Born in Taiwan, Su immigrated to the United States with her parents at the age of three so that her father, a mathematician, could attend graduate school in New York. “When I was growing up, my father would test me with math tables on the dining room table,” she said. Forbes last year. “That's how I first got into mathematics.”
Sue was not initially interested in following in her father's footsteps in a STEM career. As a teenager, she dreamed of becoming a pianist. “I wasn't good enough to do that, so I became an engineer,” she said.
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She earned bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from MIT, and spent her early career working in a variety of roles at Texas Instruments and IBM in the 1990s — both huge technology companies, during that era.
“I was really lucky at the beginning of my career,” Su told TIME. “Every couple of years, I would do something different.”
In 2012, Su was hired by AMD as senior vice president and general manager of the company's global business units, according to Her profile is on LinkedIn. Two years later, she ascended to the CEO position, becoming the first woman to lead AMD since the company was founded in 1969.
“I felt like I was training for an opportunity to do something useful in the semiconductor industry,” she said. “AMD was my chance.”
Play the long game
Su is one of the few Fortune 500 CEOs with a Ph.D. Her engineering background has helped her lead some of the technological innovations — including a new, faster CPU chip for PCs — that have driven AMD's recent success.
Her friends and colleagues describe her as a “skilled strategist,” and she sometimes is He holds meetings on weekends and employees are expected to work after midnightTime reported. Patrick Moorhead, a technology industry analyst and former AMD CEO, told the magazine that its high expectations could make it difficult for people to stay in AMD in the long term.
It may be on purpose: “I don't think leaders are born,” Su said. “I think leaders are trained.”
When he became CEO, Su promoted a three-part plan to help AMD compete with competitors Intel and NvidiaTime magazine reported: selling only high-quality products, deepening customer confidence and streamlining company operations. The long-term plan took some time to come to fruition, but in 2022, AMD surpassed Intel in terms of market cap and annual revenue.
On the other hand, Nvidia is not only the largest chip manufacturer in the world, it is It recently overtook Apple As the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. But she said Sue measures success in decades, not quarters.
“When you invest in a new area, it takes five to 10 years to build out all the different pieces,” Su said. “The thing about our business is that everything takes time.”
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