A titan in her industry, this Taiwanese American was an engineering prodigy at an early age
Source: Forbes.
When it comes to the rapidly progressing and in-demand field of AI, one company comes to everyone’s mind as its trailblazer as well as the current gold standard. Nvidia, co-founded by Jensen Huang, is an unequivocal leader in AI chip production and supply. But that may soon change. After a wildly successful 2023, AMD’s CEO plans to compete against Nvidia’s AI monopoly. Who is Dr. Lisa Su and how did the brilliant engineer from Taiwan grow up to lead major companies into ambitious new development?
Personal Background & Immigration to the US
Lisa Su was born in Tainan City, Taiwan, in 1969 and immigrated to the US at age three with her family. She and her siblings were encouraged to study science and math from a very early age. When she was seven, her father, a statistician, started quizzing her on multiplication tables, and her mother, an accountant who later became an entrepreneur herself, introduced young Su to business concepts.
This encouragement and training paid off by instilling a love of engineering within Su by the time she was 10 years old. She took apart and reassembled her brother’s remote-controlled cars. She graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1986 and went on to MIT, majoring, unsurprisingly, in electrical engineering. There she developed a fascination with semiconductors, focusing on them for most of her later years.
She stayed at MIT after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering to pursue her master’s and then doctoral degrees. According to her advisors, she was one of the first researchers to look into silicon-on-insulator technology, a then-unproven technology for increasing transistors’ efficiency.
Professional Background & Achievements
In June 1994, Su became a member of the technical staff at Texas Instruments. Less than a year later, IBM appointed her vice president of its semiconductor research and development center, where she played a critical role in developing copper technology in semiconductor chips, which when launched in 1998 ended up setting new industry standards and producing chips that were 20% faster.
Later, IBM made Su the director of its Emerging Products division, created by and for her. Su hired more researchers, and they got to work. In 2001, MIT Technology Review named her a Top Innovator Under 35, in part due to her work in the Emerging Products division.
After IBM, Su went onto work as the CTO at Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., heading its research and development until 2009. She then became a senior vice president of the company’s networking and multimedia group.
In 2012, she became a senior vice president and general manager at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and in 2014, the company made her its president and CEO.
A decade since her appointment as CEO, AMD’s shares have increased nearly 40 times, making Su’s net worth skyrocket to $1.1 billion as of July 2024. Once a secondary option to superior companies, AMD now boasts a market capitalization roughly twice that of Intel.
For her next ambitious mission, Su plans to compete with a giant co-founded by fellow Taiwanese American Jensen Huang, and the stranglehold his company, Nvidia, has on the market for graphics chips used in AI. While AMD is far from matching Nvidia’s first-place numbers, Su is confident that because of the rising demand for AI, in due time AMD will become a worthy competitor. After all, its data center business grew by 80% in the fiscal quarter ending March 31, 2024, and the company expects to hit $4 billion in AI processor sales for the year.
Contributions to the US Economy
In 2002 Su was selected as one of the “Top 100 Young Innovators” by MIT Technology Review. In 2009, she was named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), having published more than 40 technical articles. She was named “2014 Executive of the Year” at the EE Times and EDN 2014 ACE Awards.
In 2016, she was named one of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Technology” by the National Diversity Council. Fortune named her one of “World’s Greatest Leaders” in 2017.
In 2019, she was the highest-paid CEO of any company in the S&P 500. She was ranked second on the Fortune “Business Person of The Year” in 2020.
In 2021, she was named a member of the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and inducted into the Women in Technology Hall of Fame.
In 2022 PeaceTech Lab, the award-winning nonprofit formed by the United States Institute of Peace that aims to combine the power of technology, data, and media to promote violence reduction and global peace, named Su its International Peace Honors Honoree “for her achievements in revolutionizing high-performance computing, the donation of supercomputing power for infectious disease research, and inspiring people from all backgrounds to pursue careers in STEM.” Also in 2022, MIT named its new nanoscience and nanotechnology center the Lisa T. Su Building.
A comprehensive list of her achievements and honors would span several pages.
