Profile of AMD CEO Lisa Su, who has helped the company return to revenue growth by reducing the company's dependence on PC sales
From the wide windows of her fourth-floor office, Lisa Su can look across the Austin campus of Advanced Micro Devices and see the laboratory building where the company's new chips get tested.
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2017 Fortune profile captures Lisa Su three years into the turnaround that began with her 2014 takeover and the Zen chip program, when reducing AMD's dependence on cyclical PC sales was the stated strategy. Later coverage shows where that diversification landed: by 2024, CTO Mark Papermaster counted $5B in AI chip sales, up from $100M a year earlier, making the data center the successor to the PC business this profile describes her moving away from.
The through-line across the related profiles is consistent framing — Su as the architect of 'one of the great tech turnarounds' — but the competitive target has shifted from Intel's server stronghold to Nvidia's AI accelerator crown, with recent quarters showing both the payoff (Q2 data center revenue up 14% YoY) and the new constraint: US export curbs on China sales.
First-order effects
- AMD's revenue mix shifts away from PC-cycle exposure toward server and data center chips, directly changing which end-market swings move its quarterly results.
Second-order effects
- Nvidia's lead in AI accelerators forces AMD into heavier capital commitments — the reported up-to-$5B investment-grade bond sale for AI spending and the acquisition of Toronto startup Taalas are the funding side of that chase.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, AMD completes its transformation from a PC-processor company into an AI-hardware challenger, while export controls become a structural variable determining how much of the accelerator market either US vendor can address.
The trend: AMD's decade-long diversification under Lisa Su is converging on AI accelerators as the replacement for the PC business she set out to de-emphasize.