Lisa Su

She Rescued Her Company By Predicting the Computer Chips of the Future

Now in her 10th year at the helm of Advanced Micro Devices, Dr. Lisa Su is widely credited with saving the company, whose stock is up 73% over the past five years. The 54-year-old chipmaker was best known for its rivalry with Intel, but now it’s the No. 2 player in GPUs, the chips that are powering the AI revolution, behind Nvidia. (Colette Kress, CFO of NVIDIA, is also one of our New Era of Leadership winners.) After earning a Ph.D. at MIT, Su stepped into the world of semiconductors and chips at Texas Instruments and IBM before joining AMD. She was the SVP and general manager of AMD’s global business units when her predecessor stepped down, leaving behind a company with billions of dollars of debt. After taking over as CEO, she led an effort to create a radically different design of the company’s CPUs, which are now used by everyone from Microsoft to Sony in game consoles.

By Audrey Goodson Kingo