Lisa Tzwu-Fang Su (born November 7, 1969) is a Taiwanese and American business executive, computer scientist, and electrical engineer. She has been the president and CEO of the American semiconductor company AMD since 2014, and is credited with revitalizing the company through a focus on high-performance computing and strategic partnerships. Su is known for her pioneering work in semiconductor manufacturing technologies, particularly silicon-on-insulator (SOI) and copper interconnect processes, during her tenure at IBM.
Born in Tainan, Taiwan, Su immigrated to the United States as a child and grew up in New York City. She earned three degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), including a PhD in 1994. Before joining AMD, she held engineering and management roles at Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor. Her leadership at AMD has been marked by a dramatic increase in market capitalization and the company's first-ever overtaking of Intel in market value.
Early life and education
Su was born in Tainan, Taiwan, to a Taiwanese Hokkien-speaking family. She immigrated to the United States at age three with her parents, Su Chun-hwai and Sandy Lo, and grew up in the Queens borough of New York City. Her father worked as a statistician for the city government, and her mother was an accountant who later became an entrepreneur. Both parents encouraged Su and her brother to study math and science from an early age. Su developed an early interest in engineering, taking apart and fixing her brother's remote control cars at age ten and owning her first computer, an Apple II, in junior high school.
She attended the Bronx High School of Science in New York City, graduating in 1986. Su then enrolled at MIT in the fall of 1986, initially considering electrical engineering or computer science, and chose electrical engineering because it seemed the most difficult major. During her freshman year, she worked as an undergraduate research assistant through MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), manufacturing test silicon wafers for graduate students. Summer jobs at Analog Devices further fueled her interest in semiconductors. She earned her bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, followed by a master's degree in 1991, and completed her PhD in 1994 under advisors Dimitri A. Antoniadis and James E. Chung. Her dissertation, "Extreme-submicrometer silicon-on-insulator (SOI) MOSFETs," was among the first research into SOI technology, a then-unproven method for increasing transistor efficiency.
Career at Texas Instruments and IBM
In 1994, Su joined Texas Instruments as a member of the technical staff in its Semiconductor Process and Device Center, working there until February 1995. That month, she moved to IBM as a research staff member specializing in device physics. She was later appointed vice president of IBM's Semiconductor Research and Development Center. At IBM, Su played a critical role in developing the "recipe" to replace aluminum with copper connections in semiconductor chips, solving the problem of preventing copper impurities from contaminating devices during production. The copper technology launched in 1998, resulting in chips up to 20% faster than conventional versions and setting new industry standards.
In 2000, Su took a year-long assignment as technical assistant to IBM CEO Lou Gerstner. She then founded and headed IBM's Emerging Products division, an internal startup focused on biochips and low-power, broadband semiconductors. Their first product was a microprocessor that improved battery life in handheld devices. Su also represented IBM in a collaboration with Sony and Toshiba to create next-generation chips, leading to the nine-processor Cell microprocessor used in the PlayStation 3. She remained vice president of IBM's semiconductor R&D center until May 2007.
Freescale and AMD leadership
Su joined Freescale Semiconductor in June 2007 as chief technology officer, heading research and development until August 2009. She then served as senior vice president and general manager of Freescale's Networking and Multimedia Group until December 2011. In January 2012, Su joined AMD as senior vice president of global business units, and in 2014 she was promoted to chief operating officer. In October 2014, she was appointed president and CEO, succeeding Rory Read.
Under Su's leadership, AMD shifted its focus to high-performance computing, launching the Zen microarchitecture in 2017, which became the foundation for competitive Ryzen processors and EPYC server chips. She also forged partnerships with major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services and Azure, to supply custom chips for data centers. During her tenure, AMD's market capitalization grew from roughly $3 billion to more than $700 billion, and the company overtook Intel in market value for the first time in 2022.
Awards and recognition
Su has received numerous accolades throughout her career. In 2014, she was named Executive of the Year by EE Times and became the first woman to be named Time magazine's CEO of the Year, an honor she received again in 2024. Fortune listed her among the World's Greatest Leaders in 2017. In 2021, she became the first woman to receive the IEEE Robert Noyce Medal. In 2024, she was selected as a Fellow of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), and in 2025, Forbes named her the tenth most powerful woman in the world. She was also recognized as one of the "Architects of AI" for Time's Person of the Year in 2025.
Su is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a member of The Business Council. She has served on the boards of Analog Devices, Cisco Systems, the Global Semiconductor Alliance, and the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association. As of 2016, she has published over forty technical articles and coauthored a book chapter on next-generation consumer electronics.