Lisa Su

In two thousand and fourteen, Lisa Su became CEO of AMD. Intel owned eighty-five percent of the processor market. AMD was making chips in the same fabs as everyone else, competing on price against a company with three times the margins. Su had a different idea. Build specialized chips for specific problems, not generic chips for everyone else. She commissioned designs for data centers, gaming consoles, and AI accelerators. Not consumer laptops where Intel was unbeatable. Each chip was a market where Intel wasn't dominant. AMD couldn't beat Intel at being Intel. But AMD could beat Intel at being something different. The company became incomparable. Refusal to compete where Intel won meant winning elsewhere. Gaming consoles became the anchor.