Robbie Whelan

Yeah, NVIDIA, most people think that NVIDIA controls 90% or more of the advanced AI chip market.

And I can't think of another industry where there's such a market concentration.

It's not that Nvidia has chased out the competition or had some sort of nefarious strategy to make it impossible for people to compete with them.

It's that they were very early first movers in this idea that these chips that used to be primarily used for video games were also really, really good for doing AI computing.

So AMD is very much the David to NVIDIA's Goliath.

And the CEO of AMD, a woman named Lisa Su, she has a really good track record of slaying giants.

She's done it before, but she's never met an opponent like NVIDIA.

NVIDIA is truly a Goliath here.

And the idea that she's going to take them on, it's very audacious and it's very exciting for a lot of people who watch this industry.

She's an engineer who has a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT.

She's deeply interested in what's called device physics, which is sort of the marriage of gadgets and hard science.

So she understands how a piece of silicon inscribed with transistors translates into the computing power that appears on your screen when you're a software developer.

She understands it perfectly.

She looked at the product line of what AMD was making and she said, we're not focusing on the right things.

We need to be focused on accelerated advanced computing because that's what our customers want.

She would go to these meetings and they would say, it's great that you guys make computer chips that power PCs or mobile devices, but what we really want is a data center server that can help us take our products to the next level.

So she totally revamped AMD's product line, and AMD started making these chips that are essential to the data center.

She positioned herself in a way that she was in the data center, she ate up Intel's market share in data center computing, and she really leapfrogged Intel.

They were having a board meeting in late 2022.

And so she comes to this board meeting and she says, look, I've had this epiphany.