AMD shares rose 5% on Thursday, the same day Nvidia announced that its CEO Jensen Huang — Lisa Su's first cousin, once removed — would resign following an extramarital affair scandal and a board investigation into concerns he may have been the subject of a foreign intelligence effort. The coincidence of those two facts tells you most of what you need to know about Su's position in the semiconductor industry: the closest thing Huang has to a family rival, and, according to some industry observers, a possible outside candidate to replace him.

What does this change for AMD? In the near term, perhaps little — but the market's reaction suggests investors see option value in Su's next move.

From near-collapse to $950 billion

When Su joined AMD in 2012 as general manager of Global Business Units, the company's market capitalization was under $2 billion, and most of its revenue came from PC chips just as the PC market shrank. She became President and CEO in October 2014. As of Thursday, AMD's value stood above $950 billion — a growth of more than a hundredfold, though still a fraction of Nvidia's nearly $4 trillion.

Her turnaround logic was ruthless subtraction. In 2014, AMD held a large but scattered portfolio spanning PCs, embedded systems, graphics and low-power mobile. Su discarded the low-margin, low-power segment to concentrate on high-end silicon for cloud, data centers (facilities housing computing infrastructure) and game consoles. The Ryzen consumer CPUs and EPYC server processors — adopted by Amazon, Microsoft and Google Cloud — rebuilt market share in both segments. In 2018, AMD shipped the world's first 7-nanometer data center GPUs, the Radeon Instinct MI50 and MI60. By 2020, market capitalization exceeded $110 billion.

Earlier, a "semi-custom" strategy — adapting core chip designs to individual customers — had secured contracts for Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One, reducing AMD's dependence on the shrinking PC business.

A cousin she barely knew

Su and Huang did not meet until well into their careers, despite both immigrating to the United States from Taiwan as children. Su's maternal grandfather was the eldest brother of Huang's mother. Huang joked about the rivalry at an all-hands meeting last year: "When we give a presentation, the whole market goes up. When she gives a presentation, my stock price goes down."

Education and early career

Born Lisa Tzwu-Fang Su in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1969, she moved to the US at around age three when her father, a statistician, pursued graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The family settled in Queens, New York. She graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1986 and earned bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering at MIT during the 1990s. Her doctoral work on MOSFETs — tiny electronic switches inside chips — set up her industry career.

She worked at Texas Instruments, IBM and Freescale Semiconductor. As lead scientist at IBM's Semiconductor R&D Center, she contributed to developing copper interconnects that replaced aluminum in chips. At Freescale, as senior vice president and general manager, she prepared the company for its IPO.

What pressure is AMD under?

Plenty. Nvidia and Intel — AMD's two largest competitors — announced a strategic collaboration last year to develop AI infrastructure and personal computing products. Intel shares jumped 23% on the news; AMD's stock fell. The deal combines Nvidia's AI software strength with Intel's hardware, and observers expect significant pressure on AMD.

Export controls add another variable. In April 2025, AMD estimated an $800 million revenue hit after the Trump administration tightened controls that blocked its China-specific MI308 AI chips. "We lead today because we have the best technology. However, if we're not able to fully have our technology adopted in the rest of the world, there will be other technologies that will come to play," Su told a US Senate hearing in May 2025. "They may not be as good as we are today, but frankly, usage really spurs innovation."

The restriction was lifted in July 2025, and by September both Nvidia and AMD had agreed to share 15% of their China chip-sale revenues with the US government in exchange for keeping their export licenses.

The OpenAI deal and the criticism she courts

In October 2025, AMD struck a multi-billion-dollar, multi-year partnership to supply OpenAI, which will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD GPUs. OpenAI may take a roughly 10% equity stake, vesting on deployment and share-price targets. "This partnership is a major step in building the compute capacity needed to realize AI's full potential," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said. The fine print on those targets, notably, has not been disclosed.

Su's handling of criticism is documented. When SemiAnalysis analysts wrote in March 2025 that AMD's GPUs remain inferior to Nvidia's because AMD's software limits the hardware, Su joined a 90-minute call with the lead analyst the next day. "Feedback is a gift even when it's critical," she wrote on X. "We have put a ton of work into customer and workload optimizations, but there is lots more we can do to enable the broad ecosystem."

Recognition and personal life

Time named Su CEO of the Year in 2024 — the first woman to receive the title. In 2022, she became the first MIT alumna to fund a building bearing her own name: MIT.nano's Building 12 is now the Lisa T. Su Building, and her fellowship fund supports female graduate students in nanotechnology. She attended White House AI events in September 2025, including a dinner alongside Bill Gates, Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg, and has endorsed the administration's AI Action Plan — which critics say overrides state-level AI governance. She married Daniel Lin; little else about their private life is on the record. She boxes at home, sleeps five to six hours a night, seven on weekends.