Su Zifeng saved AMD, and now she wants to compete with Huang Renxun for dominance in AI

On June 5th, it was reported that as the CEO of AMD, Su Zifeng had helped the once bankrupt semiconductor manufacturer out of the crisis and pushed its stock price up nearly 30 times in less than 10 years. Now, she is preparing for the upcoming artificial intelligence revolution, competing with Nvidia for dominance, and she is confident that she can win

On June 5th, it was reported that as the CEO of AMD, Su Zifeng had helped the once bankrupt semiconductor manufacturer out of the crisis and pushed its stock price up nearly 30 times in less than 10 years. Now, she is preparing for the upcoming artificial intelligence revolution, competing with Nvidia for dominance, and she is confident that she can win.

In the conference room located at the top of AMD's headquarters building in Santa Clara, California, USA, Su Zifeng manages a company that is even older than Silicon Valley. Walking down Highway 101 next to the building, you can witness the history of AMD, including the old wafer factory located in Sunnyvale, where AMD once produced chips. Through the window of the conference room, Su Zifeng can also see AMD's arch rival - Intel's office building. However, Intel's current market value is approximately $120.3 billion, which has been surpassed by AMD ($153.5 billion).

Just a few years ago, the situation was completely different. In 2014, when Su Zifeng, who was 46 years old at the time, took over as the CEO of AMD, the chip manufacturer was on the brink of bankruptcy. The company has laid off about a quarter of its employees and its stock price hovers around $2. Former AMD executive Patrick Moorhead once stated that the company would be 'completely lifeless'.

However, Intel is also in a dilemma due to manufacturing delays and Apple's decision not to use its chips in the iPhone. With a keen strategic vision, Su Zifeng immediately caught the mistake of his opponent and reached cooperation agreements with laptop manufacturers such as Lenovo, gaming giant Sony, and technology giants such as Google and Amazon. Last year, the chip manufacturer's massive data center business brought it $6 billion in revenue.

Intel's annual revenue is $63 billion, while AMD's $23.6 billion still pales in comparison. However, Su Zifeng seized the coveted server chip market share of its Silicon Valley neighbor and acquired semiconductor company Xilinx, causing AMD's stock price to soar nearly 30 times in the nine years since Su Zifeng took over.

Add artificial intelligence to each AMD product

With the popularization of artificial intelligence, people's demand for the "silicon brain" behind machine learning is increasing. Su Zifeng is facing a huge opportunity and a daunting challenge in this field: can AMD produce powerful enough chips to break NVIDIA's almost monopolistic position in the GPU market? Nvidia has laid the foundation for the current wave of artificial intelligence technology. Regarding this, Su Zifeng said, "Looking ahead to the next five years, you will see the traces of artificial intelligence in every product of AMD, and it will become the biggest growth driver of AMD

For the past nine years, Su Zifeng has been operating AMD at an overload, just like game players attempting to exceed the performance limits set by the manufacturer. Unlike many technology executives, Su Zifeng is also a senior researcher with a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The combination of technical talent, interpersonal skills, and business acumen has made her one of the highest paid CEOs among S&P 500 companies in the past few years, with a total salary of $30.2 million in 2022.

Overall, Su Zifeng has accumulated $740 million in wealth (mainly in AMD stocks), making her 34th on Forbes magazine's annual list of wealthy women in the United States. Microsoft's Chief Product Officer, Panos Panay, exclaimed, "She was absolutely at her best, and in the end, she perfectly demonstrated herself." In 2014, when Panay first met Su Zifeng, she began to launch AMD's transformation.

However, unlike Intel, which has seen revenue decline of 12% to $63.1 billion over the past three years, Nvidia still seems to be a leader in the industry. In addition to presenting amazing images in games such as cyberpunk 2077, Nvidia's GPU has become the preferred engine for AI companies such as OpenAI. The chat robot ChatGPT from OpenAI can provide surprising humanized answers, making the public excited and uneasy.

Although these so-called big language models are very elementary, they are the beginning of the transformation of AI. Bill Gates and others said that they will be as significant as the birth of the Internet. At present, there is a huge demand for GPUs required for artificial intelligence in the market, and more than one research company predicts that the relevant market size will reach 400 billion US dollars in the next decade. But now only NVIDIA is able to provide this chip.

Forrester analyst Glenn O'Donnell said, "The concept that artificial intelligence is equivalent to NVIDIA has deeply ingrained in people's minds, and AMD must truly take action to change this

At the same time, Intel's threat still hangs over Highway 101, despite challenges such as manufacturing delays, chip defects, and leadership changes. AMD executive Forrest Norrod helped Dell establish a data center business worth approximately $10 billion on AMD chips (2014 revenue). He added, "AMD has many advantages, but what's worse is that we have two world-class competitors. I never thought the main competitors would continue to sink, we always assumed that Intel would solve this problem

Do only three things

When Su Zifeng was appointed as the CEO of AMD in 2014, some analysts believed that the company was "not worth investing in". Because at that time, AMD had a debt of $2.2 billion and some important assets had already been sold. AMD's chip wafer factory was spun off in 2009, and co founder Jerry San ders once boasted that 'real men need a wafer factory', which was undoubtedly a heavy blow. In 2013, AMD even had to sell and rent back its campus in Austin, Texas.

What's even more disturbing is that AMD's execution is also quite poor. It always fails to launch scheduled products before the deadline, with Intel dominating the laptop market, while NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Samsung dividing up the emerging smartphone market. Su Zifeng admitted, "Our technology was not competitive at the time

However, AMD does not always give investors such a headache. Sanders entered the microprocessor industry in the early 1980s and manufactured chips for IBM. But in the late 1990s and early 21st century, the situation began to change. AMD, which has always been in the second tier position, has started to create record profits by producing processors faster than Intel.

But in 2014, those glorious days began to pass, and Su Zifeng's predecessor, Rory Reed, laid off about a quarter of AMD employees. Although AMD once held about a quarter of the $24 billion server chip market at the time, it fell to 2% in 2014.

On the second day of becoming CEO, Su Zifeng boosted morale during a conference call with all employees: "I believe we can make the best products." She later said that people might think this was obvious, but the company didn't realize it at the time.

Su Zifeng's slogan sounded the horn of AMD's counterattack and was also her first step in solving the problem through a three-pronged approach: she decided to create excellent products, deepen customer trust, and streamline the company. Su Zifeng said, "For simplicity's sake, I only arranged these three things, because if it were five or ten things, it would be difficult to achieve

Su Zifeng has refocused engineers on manufacturing chips that surpass Intel, but chip designers may need several years to develop a feasible final blueprint. AMD's share in the server market has further declined, leaving only 0.5%. But researchers work silently in the laboratory. At the time, this company was in poor operating condition, but by the way, they were working on the most exciting design in the industry. The engineers' motivation came from the products, and I like to maintain that

Su Zifeng has decided to prioritize a new chip architecture called Zen. When it was finally launched in 2017, this decision paid off. It's really great, "she said proudly, adding that Zen's computing speed is more than 50% faster than previous designs. More importantly, it sends a signal to the industry that AMD has turned the corner. By the time the third generation Zen was released in 2020, it had become a market leader in terms of speed. The Zen architecture now supports all AMD processors.

As her team led the development of a new generation of chips, Su Zifeng began promoting these chips to data center customers. Even when AMD had no chips to sell, she spent several years building connections. Once, in order to attract Antonio Neri, the current CEO of HP Enterprise, Su Zifeng drove through an ice and snow storm in Texas for over four hours. Neili said, "It can be said that I no longer have fantasies about AMD's older generation, but she has shown me that she has confidence in what needs to be done

Collaborate with technology giants to borrow the East Wind

One of Su Zifeng's strategies is to sign new agreements with technology giants, as these giants require a large amount of CPU to support their explosive growth in cloud computing business. Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said, "For us, there are actually three partners for microprocessors, namely NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD. When I joined, AMD was not an important component of our ecosystem. But now, they are very important partners for us, all thanks to Su Zifeng

Last February, when AMD's market value surpassed Intel for the first time, the company's co founder, now 86 years old Sanders, was overjoyed and said, "I called everyone I know! I wasn't very clear headed at the time, and my only regret was that Andy Grove wasn't around!" Grove had served as AMD's CEO before passing away in 2016.

Su Zifeng was born in Tainan, Taiwan, China in 1969. His father is a mathematician. He once worked as a bookkeeper and later became an entrepreneur. In the same year, Sanders founded AMD. When Su Zifeng was three years old, her family immigrated to New York. She chose the Electrical Engineering major at Massachusetts Institute of Technology because it seemed to be the most difficult major. Hank Smith, who was responsible for the nanostructure laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the time, said that for someone with such a technological talent, she was also very good at dealing with people. When differences arise between classmates, she will play the role of a peacemaker.

When Su Zifeng heard that she was referred to as a sociable person, she smiled and joked, "Compared to other people at MIT, it seems like this is indeed the case. I thought no one would say I am an outgoing person, but communication is an important part of my work

Su Zifeng briefly worked at Texas Instruments and was hired as an IBM researcher in 1995. There, she helped design a chip that replaced traditional aluminum circuits with copper circuits, increasing the chip's operating speed by 20%. The senior management quickly discovered Su Zifeng's talent. In 1999, one year after the launch of copper circuit technology, then IBM CEO LouGerstner appointed her as a technical assistant.

In his first interview in 20 years, Gerstner told Forbes that initially he was worried that Su Zifeng's qualifications were not sufficient to be competent for the job, but his doubts quickly dissipated. She has proven herself to be one of the most outstanding employees in my office. Zifeng is not following the rules and has been breaking patterns throughout her entire career

That appointment made Su Zifeng a firsthand witness to corporate transformation and has now become one of the classic cases of business schools: revitalization mainly relies on the advantages of company size and a culture focused on customers. In the nearly nine years since Su Zifeng took over IBM, the company's market value has increased nearly sixfold. In 2001, she signed a joint agreement with Sony and Toshiba to implant IBM chips into the Sony PlayStation 3 gaming console.

At the beginning, Su Zifeng sometimes worried that she was not qualified to sit at the negotiating table of business leaders. But she quickly realized that being more sensitive to technological trends gave her a greater advantage over ordinary executives. In 2017, Su Zifeng gave a graduation speech at his alma mater and said, "I noticed that PhD students at MIT also work for Harvard's MBA master's program, but it doesn't matter to me." Today, the MIT New Nanotechnology Laboratory is named after Su Zifeng.

Idol of young engineers, hero of investors

At the end of 2011, then AMD board member Nick Donofrio called Su Zifeng as Senior Vice President at Austin based chipmaker Free-Scale, which is now part of NXP. When the two of them had dinner together, Donorio proposed his own idea, hoping that Su Zifeng would join AMD. This is not only an opportunity to pursue progressive improvement, but also an opportunity for reinvention and innovation.

A few days later, Su Zifeng accepted the position of Senior Vice President of AMD's Global Business Unit. Two years later, she began managing the entire company and became the first female CEO of a large semiconductor company. She recalled her early days as an engineer: "I walked into a room with about 25 people, and I might be the only woman. I was very interested in young female engineers and encouraged them to continue working in engineering

When she first took over AMD, Su Zifeng flew to Beverly Hills and personally invited AMD founder Jerry Sanders to communicate with her team. Sanders said that Su Zifeng's proposal moved him a lot, but he ultimately refused. He said at the time, 'This is not my team anymore, this is yours.' But as a former salesperson, Sanders also offered a bargaining offer: once the company achieves profitability for two consecutive years, he would visit. In 2019, coinciding with AMD's 50th anniversary, Sanders fulfilled his promise.

Semiconductor industry genius Mark Papermaster led Apple's iPhone and iPod engineering team, and after joining AMD almost simultaneously with Su Zifeng, he has been closely monitoring the company's resurgence under her leadership. At Apple, Peppermaster worked for Steve Jobs, the master of enterprise transformation, who saved the company from the disaster and developed it into the company with the highest market value in the world. Peppermaster said, "In many ways, the task faced by Su Zifeng is even more challenging. If you are not the founder, you must establish your own reputation and vision, and bring the entire company, customers, and investors to your side

Su Zifeng led AMD to success, making her an idol of young engineers and seen by investors as a hero. This even made her transform into an emoticon pack: a few years ago, she used AMD's Ryzen chip to transform into a superhero and the animation that emitted lasers from her eyes went viral on Twitter. On the shelf in her office, there is a small statue wearing orange red armor and a helmet, which was a gift from a fan at the E3 gaming conference. Su Zifeng said, "This may be one of the most interesting moments of my career." Although she is a loyal user of Twitter and Reddit, she is not "passionate about emoji packs, they are not my dish

Don't worry about customers becoming competitors

Nowadays, Su Zifeng has given AMD a new lease of life, and she has set her sights on a highly competitive market to ensure the company's future. Meanwhile, NVIDIA co founder and CEO Huang Renxun is striving to make his company the preferred supplier of artificial intelligence computing power.

Huang Renxun is a distant relative of Su Zifeng, and he saw that selling chips to artificial intelligence projects such as ChatGPT is a once-in-a-lifetime huge business opportunity. Due to the surge in demand, Nvidia's stock price has soared to a historic high, with an expected P/E ratio of about 64 times, almost twice that of AMD. Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon said, "This is also why investors are paying attention to AMD. They want NVIDIA with a more affordable price. Perhaps this market is big enough that they don't need too much competition

Su Zifeng has this idea and hopes to enhance AMD's position by updating chips every year, competing with NVIDIA H100 chips. Under her leadership, AMD's research and development expenses have increased nearly fourfold to $5 billion, almost equivalent to AMD's entire revenue when she took office.

Su Zifeng strongly supported the new supercomputer project of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the United States. When it was completed in 2022, it was the fastest supercomputer in the world. It could perform 10 billion calculations per second, which was also a perfect demonstration of AMD artificial intelligence chips. In addition, Su Zifeng has also launched the MI300 chip, which integrates CPU and GPU to compete with NVIDIA's new superchip and is expected to be shipped later this year.

Su Zifeng has always been fighting against NVIDIA through acquisitions, such as the $48.8 billion acquisition of Celine, a company that produces programmable processors, in 2022. This helps to accelerate tasks such as video compression. As part of this transaction, Victor Peng, former CEO of Celine, became AMD's president and head of artificial intelligence strategy.

In addition to NVIDIA, AMD also faces other emerging threats: some of its customers have started developing chips independently, aiming to reduce dependence on semiconductor giants. For example, Amazon designed a server chip for AWS business in 2018. Google has spent nearly a decade developing its own artificial intelligence chip, called Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), to help "read" the logo names captured by its street view camera and provide power for the company's chat robot Bard. Even Meta plans to develop its own artificial intelligence hardware.

Su Zifeng is not worried about the trend of customers becoming competitors. She said, "It's natural that companies, while seeking to improve operational efficiency, also want to manufacture their own components. But without AMD's decades of accumulated technical expertise, they can only do so much. I think any of our clients is unlikely to replicate the entire ecosystem

In the artificial intelligence chip market, Su Zifeng holds a favorable position. But she is well aware that transformation may soon evolve into decline