Engineer first. MIT PhD. Took a company most people had written off and made it the clear #2 in AI chips.
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✦ The bottom line
Lisa Su has run AMD since October 2014 — through one of the most decisive turnarounds in tech history. Engineering training, not finance. Long-term builder, not quarter-watcher.
↓ the brief below
✦ Teach me
Skin in the game
When CEOs built the company they run — or have shaped it for a decade-plus — they tend to make different decisions than hired-gun executives. Their reputation rides on the long arc, not the next quarter.
The simplest signal: how long have they been there, and how much of their own wealth is tied to the stock? Founders are extreme cases. Decade-plus operators are almost as good.
Wall Street calls this
Tenure / founder-CEO mindset
In semiconductors, decisions made today pay off (or don't) in 4-6 years — the design cycle for a new chip architecture. You need a CEO who'll still be there to live with those decisions.
The Lisa Su arc
1969
Born in Taiwan. Family moves to NY when she's 3.
1994
MIT PhD in electrical engineering. Joins Texas Instruments, then IBM (worked on the PowerPC chips used in 2000s-era Macs).
2012
Joins AMD as Senior VP. AMD stock is around $3.
Oct 2014
Promoted to CEO. AMD has fallen behind Intel on CPUs and Nvidia on GPUs. The company is not expected to survive.
2017
Launches Zen — the architecture that resets the CPU race. AMD CPUs become genuinely competitive again.
2021
AMD market cap passes Intel's for the first time ever. The unthinkable has happened.
Now
12 years in. Stock up more than 50x. Still running the company day-to-day.
From the 2026 proxy · how much Lisa Su owns
Dr. Lisa T. Su beneficially owns approximately 1.5 million shares of AMD common stock, including unvested RSUs and PSUs vesting within 60 days.
↳ At $100+ per share, that's $150M+ of personal stock — and she's the architect of every chip in AMD's roadmap for the next 5 years.
Source · DEF 14A · Security Ownership of Directors and Executive Officers · as of March 14, 2026 · Filed Mar 27, 2026
✓
Strong
11+ years in the seat. Engineer-first. Stock up 50x under her watch. The bench (CFO, CTO) is hers. Decisions are hers to live with.