Lisa Tzwu-Fang Su (Chinese: 蘇姿丰; Wade–Giles: Sū Tzū-fēng; Tâi-lô: Soo Tsu-hong; 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 and more efficient semiconductor chips during her time as vice president of IBM's Semiconductor Research and Development Center. Su is also a member of The Business Council. 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, in addition to being a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Recognized with a number of awards and accolades, Su was named Executive of the Year by EE Times in 2014, one of the World's Greatest Leaders in 2017 by Fortune and was the first woman to be named Time magazine CEO of the year in 2014, and a second time in 2024. She also became the first woman to receive the IEEE Robert Noyce Medal in 2021. During her tenure as CEO of AMD, the market capitalization of AMD has grown from roughly $3 billion to more than $700 billion. AMD also overtook Intel in market capitalization for the first time. In 2024, Su was selected the Fellow of Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). 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's 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 at the age of 3 with her parents Su Chun-hwai (蘇春槐) and Sandy Lo (羅淑雅). She grew up in the Queens borough of New York City. Her father worked as a statistician for the city government. Both she and her brother were encouraged to study math and science as children. 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. Su sought to become an engineer at a young age. She recalled, "I just had a great curiosity about how things worked". When she was 10, she began taking apart and then fixing her brother's remote control cars, 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, recollecting that it seemed like the most difficult major. During her freshman year she worked as an undergraduate research assistant "manufacturing test silicon wafers for graduate students" through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). The project, and her summer jobs at Analog Devices, fueled her interest in semiconductors. She remained focused on the topic for the remainder of her education, spending much of her time in labs designing and adjusting products. After earning her bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, Su obtained her master's degree in electrical engineering from MIT in 1991. From 1990 to 1994, she studied for her PhD in electrical engineering under doctoral advisors Dimitri A. Antoniadis and James E. Chung. 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". She graduated with her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT in 1994. Her dissertation was titled, "Extreme-submicrometer silicon-on-insulator (SOI) MOSFETs".
Career Su has been on the boards of Analog Devices, Cisco Systems, Inc., 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 discussing next-generation consumer electronics.
1994–1999: Texas Instruments and IBM R&D In 1994, Su became a member of the technical staff at Texas Instruments, working in the company's Semiconductor Process and Device Center (SPDC) until February 1995. That month, IBM hired Su as a research staff member specializing in device physics, and she was appointed vice president of IBM's semiconductor research and development center. During her time at IBM, Su played a "critical role" in developing the "recipe" to make copper connections work with semiconductor chips instead of aluminum, "solving the problem of preventing copper impurities from contaminating the devices during production". The copper technology was launched in 1998, resulting in new industry standards and chips that were up to 20% faster than the conventional versions.
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