Lisa Su is the AMD CEO widely credited with the company's resurgence in the late 2010s. She became AMD's president and chief executive officer in October 2014, when the chipmaker was struggling with debt, weak competition against Intel, and a shrinking personal-computer market.
Su's strategy focused AMD on high-performance computing, gaming, data centers, and graphics rather than spreading its resources across too many markets. She also emphasized customer relationships and a long-term product roadmap. The approach required AMD to endure several difficult years while engineers developed a new CPU architecture called Zen.
Zen-powered Ryzen processors arrived in 2017 and offered strong performance at competitive prices. AMD followed with products such as Epyc server processors and later generations of Ryzen chips. The turnaround was a team effort involving engineers, manufacturing partners, and earlier executives, but Su provided the strategic direction and executive leadership most associated with the revival.
Andy Grove led Intel, Pat Gelsinger has led Intel and VMware, and Jensen Huang co-founded Nvidia. None was AMD's CEO during this transformation.