Ryan Knudson

Coming up on the show, the CEO taking on NVIDIA and why she's not worried about an AI bubble.

Lisa Su rose to the chips industry as an engineer.

Early in her career, she worked at IBM and Texas Instruments.

Sue joined AMD in 2012 and took over as CEO two years later.

And soon after, she earned a reputation for making bold bets.

AMD is an American company that's been a longtime player in the chip space.

It was founded in the late 1960s, and it's based in Santa Clara.

When Sue joined the company in 2012, it was mainly focused on chips for individual computers and electronics, known as CPUs.

But when she took over as CEO two years later in 2014, she saw some holes in AMD's strategy.

Sue started focusing on the chips that were critical for cloud computing, an area that exploded over the last 15 years.

And the strategy paid off, and it helped AMD become a major player in a market that had long been dominated by Intel.

But the pivot proved consequential for another reason.

It gave AMD a foothold in data centers, which had become critical in the rise of AI.

After the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, Sue saw an opportunity to pivot the company again.

This time, Sue wanted to take aim at NVIDIA.

Back then, NVIDIA wasn't a household name.

But it was clear to Sue that it was on the rise.

We're going to bet the whole company on it, basically.

We're betting the whole company on it.

By the way, NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang, and Su were actually distant cousins.