Lisa Su

Lisa Tzwu-Fang Su (; born November 7, 1969) is a Taiwanese and American business executive, computer scientist, and electrical engineer who has been the president and CEO of the American semiconductor company AMD since 2014.

Su was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the United States with her family as a young child. After earning three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she worked at Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor in engineering and management positions. She is known for her work developing silicon-on-insulator semiconductor manufacturing technologies

Su was appointed president and CEO of AMD in October 2014, after joining the company in 2012 and holding roles such as senior vice president of AMD's global business units and chief operating officer. She previously was on the board of Cisco Systems and is currently on the board of the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association, She was named the tenth most powerful woman in the world for 2025 by Forbes. She was named as one of the "Architects of AI" for Time Person of the Year in 2025.

Early life and education Lisa Tzwu-Fang Su was born in November 1969 in Tainan, Taiwan. She was born in a Taiwanese Hokkien speaking family. She immigrated to the United States Her father worked as a statistician for the city government. When she was seven, her father began quizzing her on multiplication tables. Her mother, an accountant who later became an entrepreneur, introduced her to business concepts. and she owned her first computer in junior high school, an Apple II. She attended the Bronx High School of Science in New York City, graduating in 1986.

Su began attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the fall of 1986, intending to major in either electrical engineering or computer science. She settled on electrical engineering, MIT Technology Review reports that as a doctoral candidate, Su was "one of the first researchers to look into silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology, a then unproven technique for increasing transistors' efficiency by building them atop layers of an insulating material".

Career Su has been on the boards of Analog Devices, Cisco Systems, Inc., the Global Semiconductor Alliance, and the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association. working in the company's Semiconductor Process and Device Center (SPDC)

During her time at IBM,

Through her division, Su represented IBM in a collaboration to create next-generation chips with Sony and Toshiba. Ken Kutaragi charged the collaboration with "improving the performance of game machine processors by a factor of 1,000", and Su's team eventually came up with the idea for a nine-processor chip, which later became the Cell microprocessor used to power devices such as the PlayStation 3. She continued as vice president of the semiconductor research and development center at IBM,

2007–2011: Freescale Semiconductor Su joined Freescale Semiconductor in June 2007 as chief technology officer (CTO), heading the company's research and development Su stated that her plan for the company involved focusing on making the "right technology investments", streamlining the product line, and continuing to diversify, also asserting that she wanted to "simplify" the company and accelerate the development of new technology.

2015–2016: AMD diversification

When Su joined AMD in 2012, about 10 percent of sales came from non-PC products.

In January 2016, Su announced that AMD was working on new FinFET-based chips to create a new line of microprocessors, products, accelerated processing units (APUs), graphics chips, and semi-custom chip designs for unreleased video game consoles.

2017–present: Ryzen

After the initial launch of Zen chips in quarter two 2017, AMD's percentage of the CPU market share surged to nearly 11%. Ryzen CPUs have received favorable reviews from a variety of news outlets, specifically highlighting their high thread counts at prices drastically lower than those of Intel's, especially in the high-performance computing market with AMD's Ryzen Threadripper line of workstation processors. Su is the first woman ever to top the Associated Press’s annual survey of CEO compensation, with her 2019 pay package being valued at $58.5 million.

In February 2022, Su became chair of AMD after completing a reported $49 billion acquisition of FPGA and programmable systems on chip maker Xilinx.

In 2023, Su's total compensation from AMD was $30.3 million, representing a CEO-to-median worker pay ratio of 238-to-1.

Awards and honors

Su has been recognized with a number of awards throughout her career. In 2002, she was selected as one of the "Top 100 Young Innovators" by MIT Technology Review, and the following year the YWCA gave her an award for outstanding achievement in business.

The next year, she was named one of the "50 Most Powerful Women in Technology" by the National Diversity Council and "Outstanding 50 Asian Americans in Business" with the Pinnacle Award by the Asia American Business Development Center.

Su was named "People to Watch" by HPCWire, "Top Ranked Semiconductor CEO", by Institutional Investor Magazine and "World's Greatest Leaders" by Fortune in 2017. Su was once again recognized by the National Diversity Council as one of the "50 Most Powerful Women in Technology".

In 2018, Su received the UPWARD "Women of the Year Award", "Lifetime Achievement Award" from the Greater Austin Asian Chamber, elected to the National Academy of Engineering, Fortune's #6 "Businessperson of the Year", Global Semiconductor Alliance "Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award", and Forbes America's Top 50 Women In Tech. She was also appointed as Board of Directors Chair of the Global Semiconductor Alliance.

In 2019, Su was named one of “The World's Best CEO of 2019” by Barron's, Fortune's #44 "Most Powerful Women in Business", Harvard Business Review's #26 "The Best-Performing CEOs in the World", and Bloomberg Businessweek "The Bloomberg 50".

Su was the highest-paid CEO for 2019 of any company on the S&P 500 index of the 500 largest publicly traded U.S. companies. The annual review, published by A.P. and Equilar since 2011, reported that Su received $58.5 million in 2019. The figure is mainly due to a one-off stock reward.

She was the 2020 recipient of the Semiconductor Industry Association's Robert N. Noyce Award. Also in 2020, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was the 2020 Technical Leadership Abie Award Winner. She was the recipient of the Spirit of Silicon Valley Lifetime Achievement Award from the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. She was also ranked as #2 on the Fortune Business Person of The Year. In 2020, Su was named by Carnegie Corporation of New York as an honoree of the Great Immigrants Award.

In 2021, Su was named as a member of the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) by President Joe Biden, and inducted into the Women in Technology Hall of Fame. Su was subsequently awarded the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal, becoming the first woman to receive this prize, and named as #49 on the Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women, credited for the 25-fold increase to AMD's stock since she became CEO in 2014. In 2022 Su was awarded the 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".

In 2022, MIT named its new building 12, dedicated for nanotechnology research, under her name, and in 2023, Su ranked 49th in Forbes ' list of "World's 100 most powerful women". She rose to tenth in 2025.

She was ranked 12th on Fortune 's list of Most Powerful Women in 2023.

Su was included in Time's 2024 list of the "100 Most Influential People in AI" and in the Financial Times ' list of the 25 most influential women in 2024. She was also named CEO of the Year by Time in 2024. In 2025, she was named as one of the "Architects of AI" for Time Person of the Year.

She was reappointed to PCAST by President Donald Trump in 2026.

Personal life Su and her husband, Daniel Lin (Chinese: 丹尼爾‧林), are based in Austin, Texas. Su's maternal grandfather is the eldest brother of Huang's mother.

Su's father is a member of the Democratic Progressive Party and serves as its Eastern United States chapter's head and the senior advisor to the President of Taiwan, Lai Ching-te, since June 2026.

After she became CEO of AMD, Su got into the habit of boxing regularly with a trainer.