- Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) CEO Lisa Su's out-of-hours expectations are going viral after being named Time’s CEO of the year.
There are two types of leaders: those who promote a firm clock-off time and those who think work-life balance is a lie—and AMD’s CEO Lisa Su falls into the latter group.
The billionaire chipmaker boss was just named Time’s CEO of the Year for 2024. But it’s her demanding work schedule that’s making headlines.
To keep the $201 billion company at its a-game, she holds meetings with senior staffers on the weekends and is buried in her emails until the early hours of the morning.
In the profile, Time suggested Su calls managers first thing to discuss memos she sent them after midnight, however, an AMD spokesperson told Fortune that “the specific anecdote was related to a pre-read that was distributed to her very late the evening prior for an early morning meeting.”
“Lisa provided feedback on which specific parts of the lengthy slide presentation the team should focus on in order to have a productive discussion,” the spokesperson added.
Whether or not working on weekends sits well with staff, the business has experienced an impressive resurgence under Su’s leadership: Since taking the company’s reigns in 2014, its stock price has increased nearly 50-fold.
"AMD is a company that's been around for 50 years, but we've never quite hit our stride," she previously told Fortune, before adding that the opportunity to turn it around was a lifelong ambition for the former engineer who grew up with parents in STEM careers.
"It was actually my dream job to run a semiconductor company," Su added.
Su is one of few Fortune 500 CEOs with a PHD
Born in Taiwan, Su moved with her family to the U.S. at just 3 years old so her father, a mathematician, could attend graduate school. “My father used to quiz me with math tables at the dining room table,” she previously told Forbes. “That’s how I first got into math.”
She earned three degrees (bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral) in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before joining the world of work and holding a variety of engineering and management roles at Texas Instruments, IBM and Freescale Semiconductor.
“I was really lucky early in my career,” Su told Time. “Every two years, I did a different thing.”
Then, in 2012 she joined AMD as senior vice president and general manager of the company’s global business units.
“I felt like I was in training for the opportunity to do something meaningful in the semiconductor industry,” Su added. “And AMD was my shot.”
She wasn’t wrong: Just two years later she was promoted to AMD’s CEO becoming the first woman to hold to role since the company’s founding in 1969.
Being one of few Fortune 500 CEOs with a PhD, her engineering background has helped her spearhead technological advances at AMD that have driven its success, like building a CPU chip that is 40% faster than competitors.
"I'm an engineer at heart, and I actually spend quite a bit of time with our chief engineers and architects to understand where they think the future is going," Su previously told Fortune, while adding that as chief exec "some intuition about what you were trying to do is helpful."
Su first met her cousin—and rival—Jensen Huang through work
It seems that Su's gift for STEM subjects is in her blood. Not only was her father a statistician and mother an accountant-turned-entrepreneur, the chief exec is also related to her biggest rival, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang. The two are first cousins once removed—Huang's mother is Su's grandfather’s sister.
However, with Su growing up in New York and Huang moving to Thailand (and then Oregon), the two never met until later in life, thanks to their similar jobs.
"We were really distant, so we didn't grow up together," Su said in an interview with Bloomberg. "We actually met at an industry event. So it wasn't until we were well into our careers."
Despite their family ties, they won’t be breaking bread together over the festive period.
“No family dinner,” she concluded. “It’s an interesting coincidence.”
