TIME Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs had a wide-ranging conversation with the leader named TIME’s 2024 CEO of the Year, Lisa Su, chair and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) on Dec. 11 over dinner in New York City.
Coinciding with the rollout of TIME’s Person of the Year issue, the “Year in TIME” event also featured a conversation with TIME’s 2024 “Athlete of the Year,” WNBA star Caitlin Clark, and a performance by the 2024 Icon of the Year, the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) award-winning musician Elton John.
Semiconductors, or chips, power computers, phones, cars, internet services, and artificial intelligence programs. Whether it’s sending emails, buying something online, streaming movies, chatting with an AI assistant—there’s a good chance that an AMD chip is behind some of the computing capabilities.
In the decade that Su, an engineer, has been at the helm of the computing juggernaut, the overall value of AMD surpassed rival Intel’s for the first time and its stock trades at a nearly 50-fold increase since she took over. While it’s unclear what President Donald Trump’s second term will mean for her industry, Su is cautiously optimistic, stating, “We are optimistic about business.”
However, Su was much more certain about the potential of AI to bring about transformative change in all aspects of society. She called AI “the most important technology that I’ve certainly seen in my career.” Even though AI is only in its “very, very beginning” stage, she predicted it will be “10 times more amazing 12 months from now.”
Jacobs pointed out that many of the most advanced chips are made outside of the U.S. When he asked her when they would be made in the U.S. she estimated three to five years. She explained that chips only became a hot-button political issue relatively recently, citing the semiconductor shortage that started during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, there has been a lot more investment in this area.
Then Jacobs brought up her competitors, Nvidia and Intel. Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger recently stepped down, and when Su was asked who should replace him, she did not name names but said she has “a lot of respect for Pat as a colleague” and emphasized that the role is “a tough job.” When Jacobs asked whether President Joe Biden’s administration has encouraged her to merge AMD with Intel, she said no.
Despite the rivalries, Su said “there are multiple winners in this market” and that semiconductor companies need one another: “We’re partnering with many of the companies in the semiconductor industry because no one company has all of the good ideas. It is a place where we absolutely have to come together. There are places where we’re going to compete, and there are places where we’re going to collaborate.”
In his final question, Jacobs pointed out that sometimes the most important decisions leaders make is not to do something and asked Su if she would share an example. Su said that sometimes her board will ask her why AMD is not making popular small computer devices like phones or tablets. She argues that AMD has to stick to what it does best: making the underlying technology, joking, “Big computers were not sexy 10 years ago, but they’re kind of sexy now.”
Jacobs responded, “Well, Lisa Su, thank you for making supercomputers sexy.”
A Year in TIME was presented by American Family Insurance, Absolut, Land O’Lakes, and Nike.