Lisa Su (AMD)

Lisa Su became CEO of AMD in October 2014, taking over from Rory Read during a period when AMD was losing significant market share to Intel and many analysts questioned the company's survival. Her first major strategic decision was pivoting resources toward the Zen architecture, which launched with Ryzen in 2017 and transformed AMD's competitive position.

Lisa Su earned her bachelor's, master's, and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT, where she researched silicon-on-insulator technology as a graduate student. Before joining AMD, she held engineering and executive roles at Texas Instruments, IBM (where she worked on the Cell processor for the PlayStation 3), and Freescale Semiconductor.

Lisa Su and Jensen Huang are actually distant relatives; Su's maternal grandfather was Huang's uncle, making them second cousins once removed. Both are of Taiwanese descent and have led two of the most important semiconductor companies in the world, though they compete in different segments.

AMD's stock traded around $3 per share when Lisa Su became CEO in 2014, and it surged to over $150 at its peak in late 2021, representing one of the most dramatic turnarounds in semiconductor industry history. The gains were driven by the success of the Ryzen, EPYC, and Radeon product lines and AMD's growing dominance in data center CPUs.