Lisa Su

speaker

165 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard May 2025 last heard 9 Dec

Lisa Su’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Pivot · AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher · 10 May 2025 podcast

be as good a U.S. company as we can be, knowing that these things will have some impacts. The way I look at it, though, Kara, is these are a little bit short-term impacts. And so I don't want to say we don't spend time on short-term impacts, of course we spend time on short-term impacts. But it's a shock to your system.

But over the medium term, if what we do is we get to a balanced trade system, which is what we want is as a U.S. semiconductor company that has a lot of products, we want to sell it as broadly as possible and ensure that we still stay competitive in that regime. And so I think those are kind of the key high-level bullet points that are really important.

Well, I would say overall, when we look at export controls, it's really complicated. And it's one of those things where, look, we get it. We get it that we have some crown jewel technologies and some of our highest performing chips are, frankly, in the largest supercomputers. So I'm actually really proud of the fact that

If you look at the top 10 supercomputers in the world, you know, five out of 10 of them have AMD technology in it. The number one has the number one supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Labs is our technology, the number three at Oak Ridge. So we have really powerful things and they're going to be export controls. That's a fact of life.

What we want to do is ensure that when you look at the framework of chips that we build, there are, let's call it consumer chips, there are, let's call it competitive but not bleeding edge chips that we would like access to. And then for the highest performing chips, we understand we're going to be export controlled. And our job is to make sure that we are

really spending time with those who are making these decisions that they understand.

Yeah, and I think those are fine. Like, those haven't changed.

When you say, is it appropriate? Look, I think we... We understand that it is just part of sort of national policies and national strategy, and it has to be a part of the conversation. We want to make sure that the regs are done in a way that give us as much access to the market as is not a threat to national security.

I think a lot of it is intelligence about the market. So there are two ways to approach, I think, leadership in AI. And I'm a big, big proponent of the fact that the US leads in AI today. The US leads in AI chips today. The US leads in AI models today.

we want the U.S. to continue to lead. And to continue to lead, it means run faster. And every day, that's what we think about. When you actually ask me what I think about every day, I'm not necessarily thinking about tariffs every day, although I have people who are. I'm thinking about how do I go faster? How do we get the technology out faster? How do we get the next big innovation out faster?

How do we collaborate better with our customers faster? And that's Probably where we want to spend, like, the majority of our time. Where you'd like to spend more time. Yes, and also that would be our recommendation to the administration, frankly. We should spend the majority of our time thinking about how do we as a country go faster.

And yes, there's a piece of this that says, you know, we need to also protect our crown jewels. And we want to be part of that conversation. And the part of the conversation is, you know, these rules are actually very detailed. Like, they're not like... You can ship this and you can't ship that. They're a combination of what you think the crown jewels are.

And I don't think it's a question of should there be export controls. I think there's a question of where do you draw the line on export controls. And that's where... I'd like to believe that I can take off my AMD hat and put on my US semiconductor CEO hat and be helpful in that process of defining where to draw the line.

I don't know that we need to focus on, you know, was it cheap?

With less compute.

I don't know that it changed my thinking so much internally. I'll tell you what I believe. What I've seen time and time again in tech is that necessity is a mother of invention. If you put constraints on a problem, people will find a way to engineer around it. I'll give you an example. There was a time when AMD was much, much smaller. People used to say to me, Lisa, are you crazy?

How could you possibly... compete against Intel because they had 10x the people that you do. And I was like, you know what? It's not about how many people you have. It's like, do you have good ideas? And in some sense, we were constrained because we had less people. We had to out-innovate and come up with new ideas and a new way of doing things.

I think that's what we saw a bit with the DeepSeek moment. they didn't have the compute. They didn't have the gobs and gobs of compute that we have at USAI Labs. They didn't have the chips. They didn't have the compute. And so what they had to do was think of a different way to innovate.

And I mean, the truth is, when you're trying to do something, let's call it a little bit after the leaders, it takes less resources. And what they did was they aggregated some very good ideas that came from other top AI labs. What I think we learned from it is you can slow down with restrictions, but you're not going to stop progress.

I mean, you have to imagine that there are really smart people out there across the world. And if you give them a set of constraints, they're going to innovate around it.

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