Lisa Su has never been comfortable standing still. Twelve years into leading AMD, she describes running the company less like steering a single organization and more like reinventing one — repeatedly, and by design.
"I like change. I don't like boring," Su said Thursday at the 45th anniversary forum of Commonwealth Magazine in Taipei, in what amounted to both a personal credo and a capsule history of AMD's transformation under her watch.
When Su took over as CEO, AMD posted roughly $4 billion in annual revenue. Last year, the company recorded $35 billion. The markets, customers, and internal organization she manages today bear little resemblance to what she inherited — and she considers that a feature, not a side effect.
Two Bets That Defined a Decade
Su traced AMD's revival to a pair of decisions made when the company's future was far from certain. The first was a deepening commitment to TSMC as its foundry partner. The second — more technically audacious — was an early wager on chiplet architecture and advanced packaging, at a time when the industry had not yet embraced either.
The logic was rooted in a diagnosis of where semiconductor progress was heading. As Moore's Law slowed and the economics of shrinking individual transistors grew less favorable, AMD abandoned the conventional approach of building ever-larger monolithic chips. Instead, it began breaking chip designs into smaller, modular chiplets that could be reassembled through advanced packaging — a method that allows far greater flexibility and scalability.
"When I was doing my PhD, I thought this kind of technology was nearly unachievable — the engineering complexity was too high," Su said. She was candid about what changed: the industry ecosystem, collectively, found a way to make it work.
AMD's latest AI accelerator, the MI450, is the clearest expression of that philosophy. Scheduled to enter production in the second half of this year, it contains more than 300 billion transistors and integrates over 20 chiplets within a single package. Su was careful to frame it as an industry achievement, not a solo one.
Taiwan: More Than a Supply Chain
Taiwan sits at the center of the ecosystem Su credits with making AMD's technical bets pay off. She disclosed that AMD now employs more than 1,800 people across ten sites on the island, having added five new locations in recent years — a footprint dedicated substantially to research and development rather than production alone.
"Some of our most capable talent is in Taiwan," Su said, "helping us bring the latest technology to market."
She also offered a pointed observation about the culture that makes Taiwan's semiconductor cluster distinctive: the unusual capacity of direct competitors to work alongside one another without losing the collaborative spirit that built the industry in the first place. Su said she brings AMD's senior leadership team to Taiwan every year — not only to review technical priorities with customers and partners, but to express gratitude.
"People genuinely like each other, even when they're competing," she said. Her explanation was grounded in history: these companies grew up together, investing in high-performance computing long before the rest of the world recognized its importance. The relationships formed during those years have proven remarkably durable.
A Mother's Lesson in Long-Term Thinking
Su's appetite for risk and her patience for long-horizon payoffs did not emerge from business school curricula. She traced both to her mother, who ran her own company and made clear — specifically to Su, not to her brothers — that she expected her daughter to one day join the business.
Even after Su joined AMD, the two continued to talk through business problems together. It was only when Su became CEO that her mother acknowledged the obvious: her daughter was not coming back. "She showed me that with a dream, hard work, and vision, you can accomplish almost anything," Su said.
That long-term orientation is now central to how Su thinks about artificial intelligence. She described AI as the most consequential technology of the past half-century — distinguished not by its scale, but by its breadth. Unlike technologies that primarily benefited large enterprises, AI is accessible to individuals, small businesses, and entire industries simultaneously. Her stated vision, "AI Everywhere for Everyone," reflects a conviction that over the next three to ten years, virtually every device and application will be reshaped by what the current wave of AI development makes possible.
What AMD's Taiwan Bet Means for the Region
For Taiwan, Su's remarks carry weight beyond the corporate narrative. The island's role in the global semiconductor industry has long been understood in terms of manufacturing capacity. What Su described is something more strategic: a research and innovation partnership, deeply embedded in AMD's product roadmap, that neither side can easily replicate elsewhere.
Taiwan's supply chain is no longer simply a backstop for global chipmakers. It has become an indispensable node in the infrastructure of the AI economy — one that companies like AMD are not building around, but building on.
