Impact Chiefs

Lisa Su

Chair and CEO of AMD, an engineer who led the company through a turnaround into high-performance computing.

11 quotes11 with cited sources

Speeches2026 Commencement Address at MIT

Why Lisa Su matters

Chair and CEO of AMD, an electrical engineer who took the company from financial struggle to the leading edge of high-performance computing. She has led AMD since 2014.

The journey

Su was born in Taiwan, moved to the United States as a young child, and grew up in Queens, New York. She arrived at MIT at 17, found the first problem sets very hard, and stayed to earn her bachelor's, master's and doctorate in electrical engineering. Working in the clean room, she learned to keep going when experiments did not behave as expected.

She began at Texas Instruments and then spent about 13 years at IBM, where she helped bring copper interconnects to chips and rose to vice president of its semiconductor research and development center. She became chief technology officer at Freescale and joined AMD in 2012.

In 2014 she became CEO of a company that was struggling financially. She made a long-term bet on high-performance computing, widened AMD's focus from PCs to gaming and AI, and the company grew many times over in value, passing Intel's market value for the first time. She became chair in 2022, and she credits a mentor's advice, to run toward the hardest problems, for the path.

  1. 1986Starts at MIT at age 17.
  2. 1994Earns her PhD in electrical engineering from MIT.
  3. 1995Joins IBM, where she later helps bring copper interconnects to chips.
  4. 2012Joins AMD.
  5. 2014Becomes president and CEO of AMD.
  6. 2022Becomes chair of AMD.
Sources for this profile

Written in our own words from the sources above. This profile is a draft and has not yet been reviewed by a person. How we source

Quotes

  1. I started believing in myself, not the confidence that I would always know the answer, but the confidence that even when I didn't know the answer, I could figure it out.

    Verified source2026 Commencement Address at MIT · Watch at 5:02 · Massachusetts Institute of Technology on YouTube

  2. MIT teaches you to think deeply, but it also teaches you to build, to test ideas, to keep going when the first experiment, or even the fifth experiment doesn't work.

    Verified source2026 Commencement Address at MIT · Watch at 5:42 · Massachusetts Institute of Technology on YouTube

  3. Engineering actually doesn't care how old you are. It actually cares whether you have good ideas.

    Verified source2026 Commencement Address at MIT · Watch at 6:31 · Massachusetts Institute of Technology on YouTube

  4. One of my mentors told me something that I've never forgotten. Run towards the hardest problems.

    Verified source2026 Commencement Address at MIT · Watch at 6:40 · Massachusetts Institute of Technology on YouTube

  5. Hard problems really teach you what you're capable of.

    Verified source2026 Commencement Address at MIT · Watch at 7:00 · Massachusetts Institute of Technology on YouTube

  6. I decided that calling it the engineer's instinct was the right thing. It's the ability to face what seemed like an unsolvable problem, break it down, and methodically work through it step by step.

    Verified source2026 Commencement Address at MIT · Watch at 8:21 · Massachusetts Institute of Technology on YouTube

  7. The greatest satisfaction of my career has been bringing people together to do something more than any of us thought was possible.

    Verified source2026 Commencement Address at MIT · Watch at 8:47 · Massachusetts Institute of Technology on YouTube

  8. AI can't decide which problems are worth solving. It can't make the hard judgments when the data is not there. It can't take responsibility for the outcomes.

    Verified source2026 Commencement Address at MIT · Watch at 11:24 · Massachusetts Institute of Technology on YouTube

  9. The world does not just need people who know how to use powerful tools. It needs people who know what to use them for, people with a sense of purpose, judgment, courage.

    Verified source2026 Commencement Address at MIT · Watch at 11:54 · Massachusetts Institute of Technology on YouTube

  10. Luck is not just being in the right place at the right time. It is taking the risk to work on something really hard. It's challenging yourself. It's choosing problems where you may not know the answer. It's surrounding yourself with people who make you better.

    Verified source2026 Commencement Address at MIT · Watch at 13:03 · Massachusetts Institute of Technology on YouTube

  11. Somewhere in the years ahead, you're going to walk into another room where you have absolutely no idea what you're doing. You've done this before. Go figure it out.

    Verified source2026 Commencement Address at MIT · Watch at 14:27 · Massachusetts Institute of Technology on YouTube

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