AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher

25:27So the idea that we need to go faster and we need to have more manufacturing, let's call it eggs in the U.S. basket, make perfect sense. It is more expensive. We just have to realize that it's more expensive. But the resiliency aspect of it and the sovereignty aspect of it make for good business. And that has been a change in people's mindsets. Does it change your way of thinking around your business when this is the case? It does. Because you want to make investments. I mean, one of the things, people make investments over the long term, especially in chips. Yes, I think it does. I think there was a time when chip guys would normally think, hey, let me just go to the lowest possible cost.

26:07Because everybody wants to get the lowest possible cost. And I think that has absolutely changed. Now it's like, hey, we need to have a very resilient supply chain. And that's a global supply chain. By the way, I don't think we can bring everything back to the U.S. That's also not practical. But having a good portion of manufacturing here in the U.S. and around the world gives us resiliency in the business, which is a good thing. Let's talk more about the competition, too. There's been an AI arms race going on since 2022. It's shifted the characters. Now NVIDIA is the one to beat in GPU and data sector.

26:41In a Time article, you noted announcing you 2024 CEO of the Year. you were quoted as telling your engineers that you have negative slack. You said, whatever we do organizationally, we cannot slow down. Talk about that. How has the AI changed your strategy and where do you put your energy then? So AI is the most important technology that I believe, you know, we'll see over the next 10 years. So with that, you know, as a tech CEO, my job is to make capital allocation decisions. Like I decide, where do we spend money? And over the last few years, we have really pivoted the company so that AI is in every product.

27:19We talk about big AI a lot, like we talk about the AI that goes into meta and open AI and Microsoft. But the truth is, you're going to see AI everywhere. You're going to see AI in the cloud. You're going to see AI in the enterprise. You're going to see AI at the edge, sort of in telco edge things. And the reason I say it's negative Slack is because the industry is moving so fast. Like, I've just not seen an industry move this fast. And that's where I go back to, it's not just the big players. I mean, there's some, you know, amazing, you know, startups that are coming out of, you know, the, the Stanford's, the MIT's, the Berkeley's, the John Hopkins of the world that are really coming up with really good ideas.

27:59Give me an example of one that you were like, that's pretty cool. You know, I, there's, there's many, like Luma, for example, you know, when you look at text to video and, you know, what they've, you know, been able to do, Like, you look at where the technology was a few years ago and where the tech is today and then where it's going, going forward. These are, you know, some of the examples that are out there. Like, I'm a big believer in, you know, healthcare and life sciences and that. Though for the record, Lisa never brags. It's always the dude. Sorry. They're always like, it's going to solve cancer.

28:33You have never done that to me, and I thank you for that. I'm not going to say it's going to solve cancer, but I'm going to say it's going to do a lot. Absolutely. That's why I like you. I'm giving you a compliment. For drug discovery. It's amazing. I think they're often doing it because they're like, pay no attention to this other stuff we're doing. But we're going to solve cancer. But yes, no. So it is an example, though, of where we're just at the very early innings of what can be done. And so why do I say we have to go faster? It's because we want to be the enabler of this technology. Negative slack.

29:04What is that exactly? I love the term. What is this? Oh, it's just the idea that if you build a schedule, like the idea that everything goes in order, no, you can't do that. You actually have to make it go faster than if you laid it out on a piece of paper. I see. So one area where you've been expanding is in data centers. When you took over AMD in 2014, the company's share of data center chip market was basically zero. At the end of 2024, your sales in that sector had increased. It was like maybe 1%. 1%, okay, okay. Well, basically zero, okay. I'm good at math. No, you're good at math. I'm not good at math at all.

29:41I'm not even good at making tooth fairy AI stuff. Your sales in that sector increased 69 % year over year to record$3.9 billion. In March, you bought ZT Systems for just under$5 billion. They designed data center equipment. Talk about this move to AI factory market, which is what NVIDIA has also been expanding. And in these data centers, a lot of people feel there's been a bubble in this. Some people think there's not been enough of one. And you've said you want to offer customers an open data center system rather than a proprietary system with all inclusive pieces. Explain what you mean by that and how that makes you more competitive.

30:18So talk about the data centers and then the open idea. So I believe companies need to know what they're good at. And what we're good at is building great big computing systems. And so that was the reason that we were focused on data center business. Before data centers were sexy, it was the idea that— They're still not really sexy, but go ahead. Well, you're talking to me, so they're not terrible, right? Okay, sexy. Sexy it is. So before people cared about data centers, the fact is we cared because I believe that if you can get compute at the most efficient capability, that you'll be able to really touch the lives of billions of people.

31:00And so what we see today is exactly that, right? I mean, the cloud is powering so many things, and we continue to be the underpinnings of the cloud environment going forward. So that's kind of the view of, you know, wide data centers and where we're going from there. And I think when you, you know, think about this move to AI factories, it's really hard to actually make all of these pieces work. And so our job is to make it easier for people. And so that is exactly what we're doing. That's why we acquired ZT Systems, a great system company that allows us to put together more of the components.

31:36And then, you know, to your conversation or question about open versus closed, you know, I guess I'm a believer in like choice is a good thing. Like people want choice. People don't only want one choice. People want the ability to choose kind of what their systems should look like. And it's almost a little bit like if you look at the phone industry, you know, Apple has a very vertically integrated system between hardware, software systems, ecosystem, and then you look at the Google Android ecosystem and you have lots of choices. That's sort of the difference between what I would say a closed ecosystem is and an open ecosystem.

32:13Apple's done pretty well with that one. They have. They have. Not initially, but then they did. Yes, but there are also lots of other people in the ecosystem. And that's my belief, is that in AI, because there's no winner-take-all in the AI market. There shouldn't be. You're going to have big AI. You're going to have medium AI. You're going to have small AI, big models, medium models, small models, big compute, medium compute, small compute, and an ecosystem. It's like the three bears, but go ahead. And the ecosystem that puts that together, having choice is a good thing, and that's what we are working on.

32:45So NVIDIA also has 90 % of the AI accelerator market last year, but you were trying to compete in this space. In March, you inked a multibillion-dollar deal with Oracle, a big data consolidator, I guess. I don't know what you call it now. for a new, I'm going to get this right, MI355X AI accelerators. So talk about this deal and explain AI accelerator market and why you decided to get into it. Yeah, so the AI accelerator market, you might hear it called GPUs. I mean, think about this as truly the foundation. Like when you think about training the open AI models or training the Grok models or what Meta's doing with Llama, you need lots and lots of GPUs.

33:24GPUs are very nice parallel things, so we call them accelerators, versus CPUs, which are more, let's call it traditional compute. And I'm a believer in you need all of these things. Like, there's no one size fits all in computing. You need all of the various pieces. So, you know, roadmaps are our lifeblood. Like, we think about, you know, when I talk about negative slack, it's like, how do I get products out to market faster? We're very, you know, excited about our roadmap. We are just about to launch a new series, MI355, as you stated. We'll be launching that in June. And it's the next generation, which will allow you to think about from year to year, we're going to see like a 35 times improvement in performance.

34:11In performance of these chips. Yeah. So that's pretty cool. These GPUs. That's correct. That's correct. Can I ask you a side question? It's not in here. Why do men always talk about GPUs like they're talking about their penises? Why is that? That's the side question she asks. Yeah, seriously, I've got 10 ,000. No, I've got 20 ,000. No, I put 100 ,000 together. Like, it's so strange. I don't even know how to answer that question. How should I answer that question, guys? I mean, I'm good with big, but what is...

34:45You must be like, oh, stop it, boys. I mean, I know you do. You know what I'm like? I'm like, if you need GPUs, I can help you. Yes. That's what I said. Okay. All right. Sorry. I just had to ask. Again, has never done this to me, never called me about her big GPUs, but right now she just did. She kind of did in a very classy way. All right. A lot of big tech customers, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Amazon have started designing their own chips. You know, this is something I've heard Tim Cook talk about it. Does this concern you? Talk about that. I would think Apple would be the one, would be the most forward of those, but maybe perhaps not.

35:24But talk a little bit about that because they want to control their destiny. Sure. Look, I mean, Apple's done a great job, certainly with that vertical integration, what they've done with chips. My view of the world is, look, everyone realizes that like the semiconductor industry or the semiconductor capability is so important as you think about, you know, long-term, you know, sort of business resiliency. is that it's not surprising to me that these large companies want to design their own chips. What I will say for sure is they're not designing the same things that we're designing. And so there's more than enough chip market for all of this.

36:01Our job is to partner well. I think that's one of the things that AMD does well. We believe that our job is to make our customers better and to work more collaboratively with them. And so no one's going to design all the chips they need. It's impossible. We can't design everything. There's thousands of chips in these systems. There may be cases where the application has gotten mature. Like, for example, today we design custom game console chips. That application is very mature and you want to do something custom. But when you have something like AI, where the algorithms are changing every day, you may not want to do something custom because, you know, it may not run the next model as well as the general purpose chips will run them.

36:48Right. But so you don't see it as a threat to your... I see it as a fact of life, and there's more than enough market to go after. So I want to switch gears a bit and talk about R &D. You're one of the few Fortune 500 CEOs with a PhD. You said you fell in love with semiconductors when you got, as you said, an engineering student at MIT and got a part-time job in a lab. Your alma mater and John Hopkins are two of the universities now suing the Trump administration. We're trying to cap research funds. How do you look at these governmental caps and other freezes to university research, which presumably is very critical in your mind, I would assume?

37:19Yeah, I would say I'm not fully in tune with exactly what's happening with some of the governmental caps. But if I put that aside for a moment and just talk about university research, I'm a big believer in university research. I'm a big believer in research, especially that is early on and not tied to, let's call it commercial interest, is actually a great thing. So, you know, the government has been a big funder of that. Frankly, you know, the private sector probably should do more than we do today. And, you know, we need to work through this and ensure that there's a good pipeline of students.

37:54You know, students are incredibly important in this thing. And then that we also continue, let's call it, leading-edge research that is, let's call it, not necessarily tied to commercial interests. How under siege do you think that is right now? It could ruin a whole generation of scientists, whether it's healthcare or tech. I'm certainly hoping it doesn't do that. How do you prevent that? Do you have to step in? Do companies have to step into this? Look, I think private sector does have to do more, frankly. And I think public-private partnership in general is a good thing. So from that standpoint, we get a lot of benefit from the work that we do with universities.

38:39Relatively small dollars, like for example, we give a lot of universities GPUs. Back to the big ones. Everybody wants GPUs. We give a lot of universities hardware because we want them to learn on our capabilities. And computing is expensive. And so there are places where we can do more and we should do more. But no one can replace government. For sure. For sure. I think, look, all of these things are cycles. I don't want to overreact to any given cycle. I think the long-term interests are U.S. must continue to lead. And there's multiple aspects of what U.S. leadership include. It includes work that we have to do in the private sector.

39:21It includes work that we have to do in universities. It includes work that we have to do in national labs. All of these things are important. And of course, we want to do it as efficiently as possible, right? And we all know that there are efficiencies to be gathered, but fundamentally, university research is very important. Very important. So I'm going to move on to the next thing, which is you grew up in New York, but many top tech CEOs with immigrant roost first came to the US for college or grad school. I'm thinking of Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Alphabet Sundar Pichai, IBM's Arvin Krishna, and yes, Elon Musk.

39:57Many have come to this country, to name a few. And so many. There's so many everywhere. The Trump administration has been targeting some foreign students, although that's moving back and forth, trying to take away green cards. Talk about the importance of luring top talent from around the world. And tech industry has depended it almost completely. Like, if I had to go through the various people who have invented things in this country, It's really pretty much, it's heavily oriented towards people who have come from elsewhere. Yeah, absolutely. I think the U.S. was the place to come, right? It was the place to come to go to school and the place to come to do, you know, bleeding edge technology.

40:34And I think we would like it to stay that way. So certainly, you know, skilled immigration is one of those things that we care a lot about. And the ability to kind of keep the best people in the United States is a good thing. What do you do to stop this particular trend from happening? How do you lobby against that? Because I just heard from three major technologists who are people you do not want to lose in this country. France is offering them visas and tons of money to move there. And they're scared, too, personally, because they happen to be vocal supporters of Kamala Harris, for example, and they're thinking of moving.

41:12That's at the top echelons. How do you get that back in the bottle? How do you get that? Because other countries are now moving in to take advantage, France, many other countries. Yeah. No, look, I think we all agree that this is an important topic and it needs to be – it's always a pretty difficult issue to address. I mean, we've been talking about high-skilled immigration forever. And it's been one of those things. But I think we need to continue to go through the process of recruiting and maintaining the best students and the best researchers in the U.S. Yeah, I have never heard these people say this.

41:49This is something that was new. It was fresh for me. And I don't like to use the term unprecedented, but it felt like it when I heard it. So one of the things I've noticed, you're incredibly diplomatic. I appreciate it. She's like, yeah, right. Yeah. But you're one of the top tech CEOs in the country. do you have a role or responsibility to speak out? Someone told me, I'm saying a lot of things just recently, a pretty high-ranking, well, very high-ranking CEO, I'm saying a lot of things privately, Cara, like, trust me. And I was like, what are you saying privately? What is going on? Do you feel like you have to speak out?

42:21Or most of them have not been, and in fact, some of them have been front and center at the inauguration and stuff like that. What do you think your role is, and how difficult is it right now, especially when some irritating reporter is asking you this question? Well, I'm sitting here with such a very nice reporter. I did not say irritating. Because you have bigger CPUs than those men.

42:44Look, I think as tech CEOs, we do have a responsibility to speak out. But I think it has to be authentic. And authentic means I don't weigh in on every topic that I don't have an opinion on, frankly. Like, I can't. Because in every day that we have, yes, we all read things, we all do things. But at the end of the day, I spend, you know, 95 % of my time thinking about the semiconductor industry and what we can do within that view. And so I think the opportunity in places like, you know, this is how do we be, let's call it, not necessarily polarizing. So you can say I'm diplomatic. I wouldn't use the word diplomatic, but I'm not like, I'm not out to make a headline.

43:27But I am out to be pretty authentic. So if you ask me a question, I will do my best at answering it. and recognize that the world and the country goes through waves. And as you go through all those waves, our job is to run a good company, or better than run a good company, run a great company, and continue to be the best at what we do. Is tech spending too much time on politics? You've seen the impact on Musk's companies, for example. And it's not only because the cars aren't innovating to me. It's hard. I think innovation. No, I mean it. I mean it. You can talk all you want, but as you said, innovation matters.

44:05And if they had a cool car, it would sell. Instead, they have the Cybertruck. You know not have to comment, but it's ugly. I know you think that.

44:18By the way, Tesla is a customer, and they're a good customer.

44:25Look, do I think tech CEOs are spending too much time on politics? I think as a tech CEO, I spend more time, not on politics, but on government-related things, much, much more time today than I did three years ago or five years ago. And I have to, right? Because you just went through the litany of the reasons why. We need to understand tariffs. We need to understand export controls. I think the most important thing that we need to do is to make sure that people understand our business. And if you think about other industries, like you think about the automotive industry or the aerospace industry, they've been doing this forever because, you know, they were much more entwined in, you know, sort of the national, you know, economy.

45:08We weren't. Like we were, you know, you guys just keep doing what you're doing. Now we are absolutely in the middle of, you know, sort of the national economy, you know, sort of the national security. And so, yes, we need to spend more time. And that doesn't mean like you're not going to see me on sort of on the cover. There's no chainsaw for Lisa Su, right? Sorry, I'm not going to make you insult Elon. Go ahead. It's not about being seen, but it is about being heard. And I've learned this notion of not, you know, whereas the semiconductor dynamics of supply chains and manufacturing dynamics and design dynamics are second nature to us.

45:46For those who are kind of establishing policy, it's not second nature to them. and we need to help educate. And that's the way I view this. This is like, hey, we get it. We're important. We're foundational. Now let me help be part of the solution and not just be someone lobbying for my company. Right. It seems like often a giant waste. It's exhausting to a lot of people who are into the technology itself. Well, I don't think I'm good at it. Right, right. Anything that you're not great at, you find a little bit exhausting. They're not good at it either. But you're learning, and you're learning how to make an impact on something that's very important for the country.

46:20Okay. So let's finish up with two more questions. When you took over as CEO of AMD in 2014, people don't realize that the company was close to bankruptcy. Its stock was around$3 a share. You famously decided not to go for mobile, which was the hot new thing at the time. And you're right. Lisa Su and AMD is a two-part Harvard Business School case study. Very exciting. As I mentioned, you were a time CEO of the year in 2024. I mean, this is my complimentary period. When AMD had a record year. She didn't start with this, right? But your stock, like a lot of stocks, has had a tough time this year.

46:51So your quarterly reports come out next week, which you can't talk about. But you said you have to think long term in the business. So what are you banking on in the next couple of years? What are your biggest worries as a CEO? You obviously always look at the stock market. The stock market is going all over the place, largely because of the tariffs, mostly the tariffs, actually. What do you have to think about? Because the value, I mean, NVIDIA got hit hard. People don't know what to make of these things. So how do you look at that? Yeah, so I look at it a couple of different ways. First of all, we cannot sort of rank our own value based on what the market is doing on any given day.

47:29And I tell my employees that, right? I tell my employees, hey, don't spend too much time looking at the market because the market will go up, the market will go down. We're still the same company that we were. And frankly, it's all about long-term growth. And for us as a tech company, it's all about the product roadmap. So great products, deep customer relationships end up with long-term growth, and that's what we're trying to do. I also am quite motivated by this notion that I believe in tech for good, and tech for good is the notion that the products or the technology that we're building actually does make the world a better place.

48:07I know that sounds really like— No, I believe you, actually. I don't believe most of you. No, no, no. No, like I really mean that. No, I think you do believe it. I really, like, why am I in tech? Why am I in semiconductors? It's for that reason, because I believe the stuff that we're doing. Because they're dead sexy, as you noted, but go ahead. Because the stuff that we're doing actually makes a difference. And if you actually make a difference, then that should show up in your market cap over a range of time. And I really do believe that. I'm super excited about what we have in front of us. And yes, AI is a big piece of that.

48:38But AI is a piece of a larger story of how do we use tech to make the lives of billions of people better. So on that, you have an event coming up in June called Advancing AI 2025 about the vision for AI. But tell me what you think. What is the thing that people aren't thinking about right now? And what's the thing they're thinking too much about right now? What would you say is overhyped and underhyped, I guess? I think people are spending too much time trying to predict exactly what's going to happen in the short term. The bubble. Yes. Is it bubble? Is it digestion? What's the latest model? Is some model going to come out and change the world?

49:19When is AGI coming? I think we're probably spending too much time on those types of questions because everybody wants the answer. And there is no answer. Right. There is no answer. I think where it's underappreciated is how early we are in the cycle. Like, it's really underappreciated that we are two years in a 10-plus year cycle, that the AI that we're experiencing today is nowhere near as good as it can be. and that I truly believe that it will kind of change the norms of what we consider tech to do for us. And for enterprises, it's about business model innovation. And for us as sort of people experiencing AI, it's about making our lives just better.

50:15So my very little suggestion, be a big visionary here. What's a thing that you would love to see it do? I can't say cure cancer. You can, but I don't believe you. I think as a more generic thing, I think AI can really accelerate the rate and pace of research beyond what we're thinking about today. Today, you talk about AI agents and you think about agents as like customer service agents. Right, here, let me get your ticket. Yes, these kinds of things. Like, I think about AI as, you know, PhD researchers that are helping us solve the next, you know, set of problems that we have. And I don't believe that they're taking over people's jobs.

51:01I actually, I really don't. I believe that they are making us, they're helping us accelerate the rate and pace that we learn at. And of your things that you're most nervous about? So that's techno-optimist. Techno-nervous. Techno nervous is that we get too scared of the technology. Meaning? Meaning, you know, I know there's this whole conversation about how much to regulate, how much not to regulate. Yeah, and a lot of very important AI researchers are part of that. It's not just crazy people or Hollywood. No, but I think you can work through those things. Like, I really believe you can work through those things.

51:43So one shouldn't be too afraid of it. One shouldn't slow down. Like that's my belief. All right, everybody. Thanks for seeing you. Thank you.

52:01On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yocum, Dave Shaw, Megan Burney, Megan Cunane, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Claire Cronin and Eric Litke. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you're as dead sexy as a semiconductor chip. If not, you've got negative slack at this point. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

52:38We'll be back on Monday with more.

52:45Thank you.