Ladies & Legends: Lisa Su - Marrying Vision with Precision
By Juyun Kim | 22 Aug, 2025

Lisa Su's journey from MIT grad to TIME Magazine's 2024 CEO of the Year at the head of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is a legend of the AI-revolution.

Join us as we explore the lives and times of some of history’s most prominent women of Asian and Asian American descent.

In this episode we look at Lisa Su’s journey from promising MIT grad, to billionaire-status at the helm of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), taking the company from a $2-3 billion market cap, to $200 billion at the end of 2024.

“The biggest risk, is not taking any risk” (CNBC, 2017)

This is a quote from Dr. Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, better known to the S&P 500 as AMD.

Lisa is known for her vision, grit and willingness to take chances in a field that demands constant evolution. She’s known for taking AMD from a $2-3 billion dollar market capitalization before her CEO-tenure, circa 2014, to more than $200 billion at the end of 2024.

In a position dominated by men, Lisa is a particularly unique study in technical excellence and ambition that has not only reinvigorated AMD’s product line, but has poised it as a worthy David to the Goliath of NVIDIA as it enters the next frontier of AI dominance.

"Hello welcome to Ladies and Legends, the podcast where we explore the personal journeys of legendary women and business leaders of Asian and Asian American descent. I’m your host Juyun, and today’s story is about an American business leader of Taiwanese descent who has become a pre-eminent driving force behind the AI processor race, and has single-handedly taken AMD stock from $3 per share, to $180 per share by building the company’s portfolio of high end computing products.

As a side note, it’s worth mentioning that just 8.2% of CEO’s of S&P 500 companies are women, according to Harvard Law. 

This alone makes AMD unique. 

And as another fun fact, Lisa is first cousins once removed with NVIDIA CEO Jenson Huang, giving the tension between their two companies added dimension.

Let’s explore Lisa Su’s personal journey, her rise through the ranks of the tech world, and the leadership qualities that define her as one of the most world’s most respected CEOs.

PART 1: Early Life and Education 

Lisa Su was born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1969 and immigrated to the United States with her parents and brother at the age of 3.  Both her parents came from large families.  Her father had 9 siblings while her mother had 6.  That may be why she didn’t become aware of the Jenson Huang connection until well into her AMD CEO tenure.

“Like many Asian parents, mine were very focused on education. My dad would quiz me with multiplication tables when I was about 5,” (NY Times, 2017)

Her parents, particularly her father, was an accomplished mathematician, and her mother was an accountant and entrepreneur who would start her own business in her 40’s, helping Lisa lean into the entrepreneurial tolerance for risk. 

Growing up in Queens, New York, Lisa was a curious child with an early love for math and science. She was fascinated by how things worked and was constantly disassembling devices just to see if she could put them back together. This included taking apart her brother’s model car when she was 10. 

“I’ve always had a fascination with how things worked for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, my brother’s remote-controlled car stopped working one day, and I started taking it apart to reconnect the wires and fix it,” she told Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology.

She was also a musician before she found her technical passion, and played piano for a decade even auditioning for Julliard where, thank goodness she was turned away or we might not have this titan of tech to talk about. 

In the fall of 1986, Lisa Su enrolled at MIT, choosing to major in Electrical Engineering over Computer Science in part because she deemed it the more difficult choice.

While some of us, myself included, go into university thinking they’ll pursue one thing, and then come out with a degree in a completely different area, some people are laser-focused from the start, a spark of inspiration driving their technical expertise in an area. And that was Lisa.

She earned not only her bachelor's, but also her master's, and Ph.D. in electrical engineering all from MIT.

When obtaining her Ph.D., her doctoral advisors reported that she was “one of the first researchers to look into silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology, a then unproven technique for increasing transistors’ efficiency by building them atop layers of an insulating material.

Her dissertation was titled, “Extreme-submicrometer silicon-on-insulator (SOI) MOSFETs” (metal oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor).

Pictures of her in this era show a woman with large wire-rimmed glasses, and an easy confidence, the kind that remains elusive to many throughout their careers. 

That said, imagine spending 8 years laser focused on the potential of an emerging technology, not knowing what the future held but having that extreme faith in your work – and in yourself. If we could all tap into that kind of belief, imagine how inspiring we could be to the generations of women that come after us.

Lisa’s focus has almost always been on semiconductor research and manufacturing — the technologies that would become the foundation of her career. She was one of the very few women in her field, but never let that be a limitation.

What really made her stand out was her ability to translate deep technical knowledge into real-world impact.

PART 2: Building a Career in Tech 

As soon as she graduated with her PhD, in June 1994, Lisa joined Texas Instruments, where she worked for less than a year in the company’s SPDC (Semiconductor Process and Device Center) before moving to IBM where she spent over a decade.

At IBM Lisa held various engineering and leadership roles. One of her most notable achievements was her work in launching copper technology for semiconductor manufacturing. At the time, it was groundbreaking — copper allowed faster chip performance compared to the aluminum used before.

She didn't just work in R&D labs — she led initiatives that changed the direction of the business.

The copper technology launched in 1998 resulted in chips that were 20% faster than conventional versions.  Imagine the first mover advantage this gave IBM!

At the time it put them ahead of Intel and others at least a year or two in manufacturing technology and the advantage of being 20% faster and cooler running helped them win valuable contracts with high performance computing clients.

And ultimately IBM licensed the copper process to companies like AMD, making it the industry standard.  Its licensing model produced a steady stream of revenue for IBM in addition to those from its own chips.

This tremendous success catapulted Lisa into the executive spotlight after a year as technical assistant to then IBM CEO Lou Gerstner.  Lisa won promotion to head and founder of IBM’s Emerging Products Division which began with a focus on biochips.   

In layman’s terms biochips are unique in that they are basically miniature labs that can host large numbers of simultaneous biochemical reactions.  While traditional silicon chips are made of mostly silicon and metallic layers, biochips are made of silicon coated in specialized fluids or biological markers. 

The input here are biological samples with the output being data on those samples. This has natural applications in medicine, DNA sequencing, detecting toxins, and others.

The other area of focus for this emerging products division, was “low-power and broadband semiconductors”.  The group’s first product was a microprocessor that improved battery life in phones and other handheld devices.

This is when the accolades began piling up, and Lisa’s name became known and respected in her field.  MIT Technology Review named her a “Top Innovator Under 35” in 2001 due in part to her work with this group.

Her time at IBM revealed three things that would become core to her leadership style:

1. Technical Rigor – Lisa never abandoned the science. She believed a leader in tech should understand the technology deeply.
2. Cross-Functional Thinking – She understood that real innovation required collaboration between engineering, manufacturing, and business. She once said, “my specialty was not in copper but I migrated to where the problems were.”
3. Calculated Risk-Taking – Lisa wasn’t afraid to push new ideas that could challenge the status quo, but she always backed them with data.

In 2007 she joined Freescale Semiconductor as CTO and helped pivot the company toward a more efficient product roadmap and improved profitability. Her track record of turning around performance was gaining attention.

But her real test — and opportunity — came in 2012, when she joined AMD.

PART 3: A Note About Her Personal Life

Before getting into the meat-and-potatoes of what Lisa is known for, I want to touch upon her personal life because I find this sort of peripheral information fascinating. 

It’s hard to be everything to everyone — husband, parents, children, and in this case, stockholders, all at once.  I wanted to add a personal dimension to her story.  Unfortunately there isn’t much information that can be reliably sourced.

From what is available publicly, Lisa is married to a man named Daniel Lin and resides with him in Austin.  AMD has significant operations there, despite being headquartered in Santa Clara.

I also tried to find a quote from her on domestic life, but for all the things she has said about business, her strengths as a leader, her impatience as a potential weakness, could find nothing about her husband.   It’s generally thought they do not have kids.

I did find a Reddit thread saying she drives a Porsche 911 Turbo S, with a vanity plate that says, “epyc” with a “y”, at least as of two years ago.

And I did find an interview that said her favorite thing to eat at home is her husband’s ribs. Behind every successful woman is a good man.

PART 4: The AMD Turnaround 

When Lisa Su joined AMD in 2012 as Senior Vice President the company was struggling. It was losing market share to Intel, its stock price was plummeting, and internally, there was a lack of focus.

In 2014, just two years later, Lisa was named CEO — the first woman to lead a major semiconductor company. Her appointment was historic.

“I felt like I was in training for the opportunity to do something meaningful in the semiconductor industry,” she said. “And AMD was my shot.”

A quick note on what AMD does. At the time its product line was diverse but unfocused, with no segment in which it completely outshine the competition. AMD’s main revenue driver was the x86 CPU’s for desktops and laptops which competed directly with Intel. At the time its flagship CPU line underperformed Intel’s offerings in both performance and power efficiency.

They had other products like GPU’s for gaming PC’s and workstations, and semi-custom chips made mainly for game consoles like Sony PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Xbox One. They dabbled in other areas that didn’t deliver well for them.  Interestingly, while their CPU’s weren’t as coveted, their GPUs were technically competitive with Nvidia, but lacked the marketing and software ecosystem to deliver big returns.

In short, AMD was in deep trouble. At the time the stock was trading around $3 per share and the diverse product line suffered from lower performance for various reasons.

Lisa began by focusing on creating great products, deepening customer trust and simplifying internal operations. By 2022 AMD was worth more than Intel in both market value and annual revenue. 

How did she do this?

By focusing on core competencies that had higher performance, higher pricepoints, and higher margins. 

Pre-tenure, AMD focused on products that went into low-, and mid-range PC CPUa.  Now its high performance Zen architecture (Ryzen, Threadripper, EPYC) lets it go head-to-head with Intel.  For GPU’s AMD aggressively narrowed the efficiency gap flowing from less robust supporting software ecosystems with its current push to unify its RDNA and CDNA architectures into a single unified platform for both gaming and data center applications with the goal of mimicking NVIDIA’s CUDA, a parallel computing platform and programming model — a step toward exploiting the processing power of quantum computing.

In short Lisa re-focused the company’s goals on fewer areas with greater profitability.  This continues to be the case, with an R&D approach focused on 2 to 3 areas as opposed to several.

She has said, it’s all about the long game.

“When you invest in a new area, it is a five- to 10-year arc to really build out all of the various pieces,” Lisa says, “the thing about our business is, everything takes time.”

It’s been a quick turnaround but a long road extends ahead of her.

In 2024 NVIDIA’s R&D budget was about twice AMD’s, meaning that for the foreseeable future, AMD will need to pick and choose its battlegrounds. 

But if Lisa is good at one thing, it’s strategy. And she refuses to be pigeonholed as the scrappy challenger.

“My view of AMD is that we have a tremendous set of technology assets, people, capability, customer relationships. We're not going to define ourselves in somebody else's shadow,” she has said.

In 2024 she was named CEO of the Year by Time Magazine.

“Hope is not a strategy,” Lisa has said, “execution is.”

Lisa’s quiet confidence and stay-the-course faith in steady forward progress has been a beacon in a vertical quick to reward the next hot new idea.

Under Lisa Su’s leadership, AMD's stock has soared by over 3,000%. The company has gone from underdog to powerhouse, competing with giants like Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm — and often winning.

She’s received multiple awards, including being named to Forbes’ World’s 100 Most Powerful Women and Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year.

But ask Lisa what she's most proud of? She’ll likely say building a team that believes in the mission.

While normally I like to share quotes others have used to describe our heroine, in this case I’ll defer to those from Lisa herself.

She has said, among other things:

“Run toward the hardest problems. This approach has helped me to learn a tremendous amount from both success and failure.”

It should be noted that for the full 2024 fiscal year, NVDIA reported $115.2 billion in revenue in its data center segment — where most AI computing happens.  AMD reported $12.6 billion for data centers in the same time period.

This is a vast differential that even the most ambitious leadership and focused goals in R&D may never fully bridge.

That said, Lisa Su’s journey from a curious child in Queens to a global tech leader is a testament to the power of clarity, resilience, and leadership with depth.

Thanks for listening to today’s episode of Ladies and Legends. Whether you admire her grit, her steady hand, or her vision most, one thing is clear some people are guided by a deep internal belief in not only what they do, but who they are at their core. And that should be what we all strive for in our individual goals for personal excellence.

Be sure to follow the show, leave a review, and share this episode if you enjoyed it. I’m Juyun, and I’ll catch you next time on “Ladies and Legends."