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- [00:01]
Lisa Su
Look at all these people who are here in the evening. Amazing.
- [00:03]
Kara Swisher
I know. To talk about chips. Yes, we're very excited.
- [00:07]
It's on. Hi everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. I've spoken to many people here on the podcast about the AI race and a lot of the focus has been on generative models and the companies that make them.
- [00:32]
But the real power and a lot.
- [00:33]
Of the tension in the AI space is in the hardware, the semiconductor industry that is building all of that compute. My guest today has been a leader in the chips industry for more than a decade. Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, better known as AMD. When sue took over AMD in 2014, which a lot of people warned her not to do, the company was almost on the verge of bankruptcy. By 2022, AMD was thriving and has surpassed its biggest rival intel in market cap. Last year, sue was named Times CEO of the Year. I've really always liked talking to Lisa. We have a great rapport, largely because she's a straight shooter and she actually tells me exactly what she thinks all the time, even when we don't agree on things. She's also unfortunately one of the few women CEOs in tech and so she stands out for that reason alone. But she also stands out because she's incredibly qualified for the a big job these days. You would think that the increased demand for the best high powered chips to fuel the AI race would mean that sue and AMD were just coasting, but not so. There are a lot of headwinds, not the least of which are the back and forth terror threats, export controls, funding cuts and all the other chaos coming from the Trump administration the past hundred plus days. And instead of just two major competitors, intel and of course the now popular Nvidia, there are a slew of other newcomers in the space to contend with, including in China. I talked to her all about that and about her strategy for this new future at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg center this week. This was the third event we've done there in our joint AI Discovery series. It was a great conversation with a lot of insights about the state of the industry today and where it's going, and it was actually very funny. You'll see what I'm talking about when we talk about size and GPUs, so have a listen.
- [02:33]
Lisa Su
Foreign.
- [02:40]
Kara Swisher
Comes from me, Kara Swisher and Johns Hopkins University. Recently I interviewed AMD CEO Lisa Su in the third of four Live episodes of your other favorite podcast, on with Kara Swisher, that I'll be recording at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg center in Washington, DC. In each episode through 2025, I'll be hosting timely discussions on AI policy, copyright and intellectual property and more as part of the Hopkins Bloomberg Center's Discovery series. Listen to conversation with Lisa Su in the on with Kara Swisher feed and stay tuned for more live discussions to come from our partnership with Johns Hopkins University.
- [03:15]
It is on. Lisa, thank you so much for coming. The last time we sat down for an interview was 2021. It seems like forever ago.
- [03:25]
Lisa Su
Seems like forever ago.
- [03:25]
Kara Swisher
Yes. It wasn't that long ago, but a couple milestones have passed since then. In 2022, AMD passed your biggest rival, intel, in market cap for the first time. Congrats on that.
- [03:34]
Lisa Su
Thank you.
- [03:36]
Kara Swisher
A few months later, ChatGPT came out and basically started the AI race. And of course, most recently, President Trump launched trade war with China. I don't know if you've heard about it, but it's happening.
- [03:45]
Lisa Su
Maybe a little.
- [03:46]
Kara Swisher
Maybe a little. You would have to pay a lot of attention to it. So rank these three in terms of importance of how you're thinking about your business right now, your place and your competitors, innovations, political challenges.
- [03:57]
Lisa Su
Well, first of all, Kara, it's great to be here. Great to see everybody in the audience. I like talking about chips. You're gonna see that from. Yes. You know, I started in the chip industry. I mean, I'm gonna date myself. But I've been in the chip industry for 30 years. And back when I went to school, chips were not exciting. Like people.
- [04:14]
Kara Swisher
Why did you do it? You were at mit.
- [04:16]
Lisa Su
I was at mit, and I liked the idea.
- [04:19]
Kara Swisher
It was cool at mit, but it.
- [04:21]
Lisa Su
Wasn'T even that cool. It was sort of cool at mit, but not like amazingly cool.
- [04:25]
Kara Swisher
All right.
- [04:25]
Lisa Su
But you know, it's the idea that hard. Like, I like hardware, I like to build things. And so the idea of chips, these are the brains of computers. And at that time, they were small computers. Now they're very, very big computers. I really enjoyed. But at the time, a lot of people were like, hey, software, that's a much more exciting field. So it's kind of foundational to say that right now, chips are really sort of the underpinnings of this entire tech community where AI is going. And that's one of the things that I do feel very fortunate about, that I'm in an industry that makes that much of a difference. Now back. How do I Think about these things. I mean, you've seen these technology arcs, Kara. They go in waves, let's call it 10 year waves. And you saw that when the Internet came out, and then you saw that when PCs came out and then when the cloud came out. And AI is one of those waves. But I would say that it's probably the biggest wave that I've seen in my career because it has so much potential. So, yeah, that chatgpt moment was a very special moment.
- [05:30]
Kara Swisher
Why was that?
- [05:31]
Lisa Su
You know, AI has been around for a long, long time, but what was true about it is it was sort of so hard to use because not everyone had access to AI. And what that ChatGPT moment unlocked was that, wow, now everybody can interact with AI like my dad can interact with AI because you're using spoken language, you're using text, you're using a way of expressing how do you get a computer to do things without having to have deep knowledge programming languages and things like that. I think that moment just unlocked the fact that if we can make computers easier to use, then we can get so much more productivity capability, actually new opportunity.
- [06:19]
Kara Swisher
How is it being used from your perspective right now compared to what it's going to be?
- [06:25]
Lisa Su
So I still think we're in the very early innings of usage. I would say this is a 10 year arc and maybe we're two years into a 10 year arc. But the way I think about AI is there's, let's call it regular usage and regular usage is companies. We think about companies trying to use AI to become more productive. Right, okay. How do I make something that is right now very manual and very labor intensive, much more operational. That's sort of one part of AI, but I think the other part of AI, and it's similar to the Internet era, which is you first had companies just using the Internet and then you had companies that were truly changing their business model because of the Internet. I think you're going to see the same thing in AI and we see that in our own work too.
- [07:08]
Kara Swisher
I asked it to write a tooth fairy letter.
- [07:11]
Lisa Su
Okay, all right, it did okay in that realm.
- [07:18]
Kara Swisher
It did not do great. I would say. I would say it got worse and worse as it went on as I kept arguing with it. And then it started misspelling everything egregiously and I just said, go back to the first one.
- [07:30]
Lisa Su
It should have done a little better than that, really.
- [07:32]
Kara Swisher
No, it really didn't. I'll show you.
- [07:33]
I'm going to send you now.
- [07:34]
Lisa Su
All right, I'm going To text you all, I'm going to see which model you're using. It should have done better than that.
- [07:37]
Kara Swisher
I was using ChatGPT. Is there a better tooth fairy model for someone? I'm certainly not using XAI for tooth fairies. I'm just not gonna. I'm worried about what I could get back. So I wanna get start with the challenges for you. For a company like yours, especially a trade war, you just come back from a trip to Japan and Taiwan. A majority of your chips are built in Taiwan, the world hub for the semiconductor production. That should be the 51st state. Honestly, in some ways the administration has been all, oh, that would bother China. I suspect the administration has been all over the map on this one. In his executive order, President Trump said there would be no so called reciprocal tariffs on semiconductors. And he said there would be soon. Same day Commerce Secretary Lutnick said a semiconductor tariff would be coming in a month or two. But who knows? How are you dealing with that? Talk about the challenges here. Do you feel like you need to react to these things or are you just sort of quietly sitting in the corner crying into your.
- [08:31]
Lisa Su
We are not sitting in the corner crying.
- [08:33]
Kara Swisher
All right, okay.
- [08:34]
Lisa Su
We are recognizing that semiconductors are now very high priority list on sort of all national agendas.
- [08:43]
Kara Swisher
And that is new as nationalist agenda that is key to the security of the United States.
- [08:48]
Lisa Su
That is definitely new. I would say 10 years ago that wasn't the case. Five years ago maybe a little bit. But in the last few years that's become top of mind. And what does that mean to us? Okay, so first of all, the investment arcs are not changing. At the end of the day in a technology business it's about making long. We decide what technology goes into our products like three to five years in advance. And at the end of the day our job is to build the best. So we have to keep pushing the envelope on new innovation that doesn't change. What does change are a few things. And it's not even just what's happened in the last 90 days. It's been what's happened for the last few years. Supply chain resiliency becomes really top of mind. So when, for example, during the pandemic timeframe, that was a completely unexpected thing.
- [09:42]
Kara Swisher
I think we talked about it then.
- [09:43]
Lisa Su
Yes, exactly. And when that came up, it was like people were like, why can't I get trips for cars? And it's like, well, you know what, it's because it's a many like it's a 9 to 12 month supply chain. And if you want to change locations, it might take several years and you need to plan for that in advance. And so we did a lot of work around the pandemic to give our supply chains more resiliency and that's been positive. Now, the fact that advanced manufacturing is mostly in Taiwan, that's absolutely true. And that's absolutely one of the things where we don't have enough options right now. So the focus on trying to bring more manufacturing back to the United States, I think we're all in favor of that. That's a positive. And just put it in the resiliency category, which is nine to 10 years. It will take, if at all. It will take certainly five to 10 years when I say that we're going to manufacture in the United States. Advanced capabilities, like this year, for sure. Our latest generation server chip will go through TSMC in Arizona, but it's still small and there's so many steps. It's such a complex supply chain that you just have to plan every step.
- [11:01]
Kara Swisher
When you have these tariffs coming in and out. Taiwan is facing a 32% tariff. Officials there said they had talks with the administration earlier this month and offered a zero tariff regime. Is that something that might be agreed to? Have you had conversations with the White House about this? Obviously it affects your business.
- [11:16]
Lisa Su
We've certainly talked about the implications of tariffs and what that would do overall. And I think our.
- [11:24]
Kara Swisher
When you say we talked about the implications of tariffs, how does that conversa mine would begin with, what the fuck? Are you kidding me? But that's why I'm not Lisa Subject.
- [11:35]
Lisa Su
Anyway, we would say, look, we appreciate semiconductors are really important and we appreciate that there's a long term vision of bringing manufacturing back to the US but it won't happen in a short amount of time. So let's just make sure that we're balanced in how we think about this.
- [11:51]
Kara Swisher
So if the administration levies that 32% tariff on Taiwanese semiconductors and it keeps tariffs in China in place, which at last call were 145%, I think China has ramped up its own tariffs, although it has said chips manufactured in Taiwan will be exempt, which can help you. On the other hand, Beijing has also suspended export of rare earth minerals, which are essential for semiconductors. So how do you deal with that as a CEO? I mean, these are incoming from all sides.
- [12:18]
Lisa Su
I think what we do is we stay very agile. We spend a lot of time analyzing what we can do in different places. And look, at the end of the day, we have to be part of the solution. And part of the solution is making sure that people understand this supply chain is complicated, that any changes will not happen in the matter of months, it'll happen in a matter of years. We're here to be as good a US Company as we can be, knowing that these things will have some impacts. The way I look at it though, Kara, is these are little bit short term impacts. And so I don't want to say we don't spend time on short term impacts. Of course we spend time on short term impacts.
- [13:03]
Kara Swisher
But it's a shock to your system.
- [13:05]
Lisa Su
Yes. But over the medium term, if what we do is we get to a balanced trade system, which is what we want is as a US Semiconductor company that has a lot of products, we want to sell it as broadly as possible and ensure that we still stay competitive in that regime. I think those are the key high level bullet points that are really important.
- [13:29]
Kara Swisher
So you aren't just dealing with tariffs. By the way, the Commerce Department also issued an export licensing requirement for sending your. Mita is right. Mi308 is right, yes. Chips to China. AMD says that export controls could result in charges up to $800 million. To be clear, China was AMD's second largest market, as you just noted. You want to have markets everywhere. It made up nearly a quarter of your sales. Do you think there's room for negotiation with the administration? And where are you with that?
- [13:56]
Lisa Su
Well, I would say overall, when we look at export controls, it's really complicated and it's one of those things where, look, we get it, we get it that we have some crown jewel technologies and some of our highest performing chips are frankly in the largest supercomputers. So I'm actually really proud of the fact that if you look at the top 10 supercomputers in the world, five out of 10 of them have AMD technology in it. The number one has the number one supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Labs is our technology. The number three at Oak Ridge. So we have really powerful things and they're going to be export controls. That's a fact of life. What we want to do is ensure that when you look at the framework of chips that we build, there are, let's call it consumer chips. There are, let's call it competitive but not bleeding edge chips that we would like access to. And then for the highest performing chips, we understand we're going to be export controlled. And you know, our job is to make sure that we are really spending time with those who are making these decisions that they understand, is it appropriate.
- [15:02]
Kara Swisher
This more focus on national security over other things? Because they weren't paying attention at all. But most of those chips went into, like, games and cars and things like that, which is like, who cares, essentially.
- [15:13]
Lisa Su
Yeah. And I think those are fine. Like, those haven't changed.
- [15:15]
Kara Swisher
Right. But is it appropriate to focus so much on the national security aspects of it?
- [15:21]
Lisa Su
When you say, is it appropriate? Look, I think we understand that it is just part of sort of national policies and national strategy, and it has to be a part of the conversation. We want to make sure that the regs are done in a way that give us as much access to the market as is not a threat to national security.
- [15:44]
Kara Swisher
And how do you do that? I'm really curious what you actually say in these meetings.
- [15:50]
Lisa Su
I think a lot of it is intelligence about the market. So there are two ways to approach, I think, leadership and AI. And I'm a big, big proponent of the fact that the US Leads in AI today. The US leads in AI chips today. The US leads in AI models today.
- [16:07]
Kara Swisher
Correct.
- [16:08]
Lisa Su
We want the US to continue to lead and to continue to lead. It means run faster. And every day. That's what we think about. When you actually ask me what I think about every day, I'm not necessarily thinking about tariffs every day, although I have people who are. I'm thinking about how do I go faster, how do we get the technology out faster, how do we get the next big innovation out faster, how do we collaborate better with our customers faster? That's probably where we want to spend the majority of our time.
- [16:38]
Kara Swisher
Where you'd like to spend more time.
- [16:40]
Lisa Su
Yes. And also that would be our recommendation to the. To the administration, frankly, we should spend the majority of our time thinking about how do we as a country go faster. And yes, there's a piece of this that says we need to also protect our crown jewels. And we want to be part of that conversation. And the part of the conversation is these rules are actually very detailed. They're not like, you can ship this and you can't ship that. They're a combination of what you think the crown jewels are. And I don't think it's a question of should there be export controls. I think there's a question of where do you draw the line on export controls. And that's where I'd like to believe that I can take off my AMD hat and put on my US Semiconductor CEO hat and be helpful in that process of defining where to draw the.
- [17:32]
Kara Swisher
Lines where to draw the line now, the Biden administration also put export limits on semiconductors to China. Other countries try to prevent China from getting ahead in the AI race, which was a goal. Then deep sea came out. Did you anticipate the Chinese to be able to train an AI chap out for less than $6 million? That's number is.
- [17:50]
What's the real number?
- [17:50]
Lisa Su
I don't know that. What's the number we need to focus on? Was it cheap?
- [17:54]
Kara Swisher
Cheap is what it do you with less. With less.
- [17:56]
Lisa Su
With less compute.
- [17:57]
Kara Swisher
With less compute. Did it change your thinking internally?
- [18:02]
Lisa Su
I don't know that it changed my thinking so much internally. I'll tell you what I believe, what I've seen time and time again in tech is that necessity is a mother of invention. Like if you put constraints on a problem, people will find a way to engineer around it. I mean, I'll give you sort of an example. Like there was a time when AMD was much, much smaller and people used to say to me, Lisa, are you crazy? How could you possibly compete against intel because they had 10x the people that you do? And I was like, you know what? It's not about how many people you have. It's like do you have good ideas? And in some sense we were constrained because we had less people. We had to out innovate and come up with new ideas and a new way of doing things. I think that's what we saw a bit with the deep SEQ moment. They didn't have the compute, they didn't have the gobs and gobs of compute that we have at USAI labs. They didn't have the chips, they didn't have the compute. And so what they had to do was think of a different way to innovate. And I mean the truth is when you're trying to do something, let's call it a little bit after the leaders, it takes less resources. And what they did was they aggregated some very good ideas that came from other top AI labs. What I think we learned from it is you can slow down with restrictions, but you're not going to stop progress. I mean, you have to imagine that there are really smart people out there across the world and if you give them a set of constraints, they're going to innovate around it.
- [19:34]
Kara Swisher
Did it change your thinking internally?
- [19:36]
Lisa Su
It forwarded something that I really believed, which is two things. One is that there are lots of ways to solve problems and you learn different ways. The second thing which actually was really positive is that we saw the power of open source. I'm a big, big believer in open source because it allows people to collaborate on a problem. And what you saw with Deep SEQ is put aside Deep Seq being a Chinese lab. DeepSeq was an open source model. And now you see every research group learning from some of the techniques of Deep SEQ to make their models better. I actually thought that was really cool. We saw in the realm of short number of weeks, people kind of changing the way they thought about adding some innovation from what they learned from what.
- [20:32]
Kara Swisher
They learned from others. Despite all this, Huawei is reportedly about to start sending out its own advanced AI chip to Chinese customers in May. Baidu said last week that its cluster of its Kunlun chips can support Deep SEQ model training. Has it fueled a rise of new players? Are you worried about losing the Chinese market or other Asian markets completely, especially in the mode of terrorists? Because I think the terrorists have advantage China in many ways.
- [20:59]
Lisa Su
So look, we give Huawei a lot of credit. They have a lot of smart engineers. I think we have better technology. Our goal in life is to continue to stay ahead. And that's why I said at the end of the day, we have to spend 90% of our time thinking about how do we go faster, how do we innovate faster, how do we use all of the great capabilities that we have to continue that trend that we have and recognize that yes, there's competition out there.
- [21:27]
Kara Swisher
Does this create a more competitive, especially with the tariffs on top of it and the language that goes back and forth?
- [21:35]
Lisa Su
I don't know that I would say it's more competitive. I would say that in the grand scheme of things, I'm not a big believer in decoupling of ecosystems. I actually think we work in China, we learn a lot from that interaction. I think we have teams in China. My view of the world is there's a good opportunity to recognize that there should be some limitations, but also the ability to continue to have an integrated.
- [22:07]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, I'm a big fan of not decoupling either. Part of the Trump administration's stated goal is to increase manufacturing here, which I think a lot of people have been talking. He was not the first person to talk about this. Lots of administrations have talked about that. President Biden's 2022 Chips act was over $52 billion bet to bring semiconductor R and D and manufacturing back to the U.S. trump is essentially rebranded as investment accelerator. In executive order, he writes, it shall focus on delivering the benefit of the bargain for taxpayers by negotiating much better deals than Those of the previous whatever. Okay, can you give us some insight into those deals look like and what's changed in that regard? Because you all profited indirectly from the Chips Acts. TSMC's new production site in Arizona that you noted was awarded $6.6 billion in funding from the Biden administration. Some of your key processor chips will soon be made. Your historic rival intel got over $7.8 billion in funding to advance their production products. Minto, just for people who don't know, after reporting loss in the first quarter, recently announced massive job cuts and cuts to capital expenditure. So talk a little bit about the impact of the CHIPS act and whatever you want to call it. You know, you can call it Phyllis if you want, but talk about what is exactly or that's new.
- [23:21]
Lisa Su
You call it what?
- [23:21]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, Phyllis. I'd like to call it Phyllis. Yeah, whatever. I don't care what you call it. Investment accelerating.
- [23:26]
Lisa Su
I love Kara. Don't you guys love Kara? I mean, like.
- [23:32]
Kara Swisher
Talk about the importance of this.
- [23:33]
Lisa Su
Yeah, look, I'm a.
- [23:34]
Kara Swisher
You call it Phyllis the whole time. Okay.
- [23:36]
Lisa Su
No, sorry, that'll distract me. Karen, can I call it the CHIPS Act? Is that okay? The CHIPS act is good. I thought the CHIPS act was pretty historic in the sense that for semiconductors to get to the level that it requires, industrial policy for the United States. That's a big thing.
- [23:52]
Kara Swisher
That's industrial policy. Exactly.
- [23:54]
Lisa Su
It is absolutely industrial policy. Look, we didn't benefit directly from the CHIPS Act. We didn't get any particular funds. But I'm a big believer in US Manufacturing is a good thing. And the CHIPS act was a good catalyst to start people really taking the bold steps to bring manufacturing back to.
- [24:17]
Kara Swisher
The U.S. it's expensive. The chaos involved training.
- [24:19]
Lisa Su
It's expensive. And frankly, we're all human beings. So if you don't have incentives to do something, you won't necessarily do it. Even though you know that it's a good thing to do. I think it's accelerated a bit. Right. I was very pleased to see TSMC increase their investments by 100 billion. That's huge. I think there was a big thing that people learned from this thing because it used to be that there was a belief that you couldn't build the same performance, power yield here in the United States. That frankly, it was hard. We didn't have all the systems built and all of that. What has been really good over the last several years as we've started bringing some of the manufacturing back to the United States. TSMC has now said on record that Their yields and capability in Arizona are as good as the chips that they build in Taiwan. And we see it like, we see it in our own products, like it's fantastic. And I think that's like a clear existence proof. But yeah, actually you can bring advanced manufacturing back to the US and it's a good thing to do. Now we need much more of it.
- [25:29]
Kara Swisher
Right, because they've got a 20 year, 30 year.
- [25:31]
Lisa Su
Yeah, that's right. They would say the scale is not what it needs to be. So the idea that we need to go faster and we need to have more manufacturing, let's call it eggs in the US basket, make perfect sense. It is more expensive. Like we just have to realize that it's more expensive. But the resiliency aspect of and the sovereignty aspect of it make for good business. And that has been a change in people's mindsets.
- [25:56]
Kara Swisher
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.
- [26:05]
Lisa Su
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 because 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 US that's also not practical. But having a good portion of manufacturing here in the US and around the world gives us resiliency in the business, which is a good thing.
- [26:38]
Kara Swisher
So let's talk more about the competition too. There's been an AI arms race going on since 2022 that shifted the characters. Now Nvidia is the one to beat GPU in data center sector. In a Time article you noted announcing your 20 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 ARS changed your strategy and where do you put your energy then?
- [27:06]
Lisa Su
So AI is the most important technology that I believe we'll see over the next 10 years. So with that, 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. We talk about big AI a lot. Like we talk about the AI that goes into Meta and OpenAI 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 amazing startups that are coming out of the Stanfords, the MITs, the Berkeleys, the John Hopkins of the world that are really coming up.
- [28:05]
Kara Swisher
With really good ideas that you were.
- [28:07]
Lisa Su
Like, that's pretty cool. There's many, like Luma for example, when you look at text to video and what they've been able to do, 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 some of the examples that are out there. Like I'm a big believer in healthcare and life sciences and that though for.
- [28:35]
Kara Swisher
The record, Lisa never brags. It's always the dudes. Sorry. They're always like, it's gonna solve cancer. You have never done that to me and I thank you for that.
- [28:42]
Lisa Su
I'm not gonna say it's gonna solve cancer, but I'm gonna say it's gonna do a lot.
- [28:45]
Kara Swisher
Absolutely, that's a lot. I like you.
- [28:47]
Lisa Su
I'm giving you a drug discovery. It's amazing.
- [28:52]
Kara Swisher
I think they're often doing it because.
- [28:53]
They'Re like, pay no attention to this other stuff we're doing. But we're gonna solve cancer.
- [28:58]
Lisa Su
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 cause we wanna be the enabler of this technology.
- [29:11]
Kara Swisher
Negative slack. What is that? Exactly?
- [29:13]
I love the term.
- [29:14]
What is this?
- [29:15]
Lisa Su
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.
- [29:27]
Kara Swisher
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 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. I'm not even good at making tooth fairy AI stuff. Your sales in that sector increased 69% year over year to a 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. So talk about the data centers and then the open idea.
- [30:28]
Lisa Su
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 second. It was the idea that they're still.
- [30:44]
Kara Swisher
Not really sexy, but go ahead.
- [30:45]
Lisa Su
Well, you're talking to me, so that's terrible, right?
- [30:49]
Kara Swisher
Okay. Sexy. Sexy it is.
- [30:50]
Lisa Su
Okay, 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. What we see today is exactly that. 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 why data centers and where we're going from there. And I think when you 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, great system company that allows us to put together more of the components. Then to your conversation or question about open versus closed, I guess I'm a believer in choice is a good thing. People want choice. People don't only want one choice. People want the ability to choose what their systems should look like. It's almost a little bit like if you look at the phone industry, 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.
- [32:20]
Kara Swisher
Apple's done pretty well with that one.
- [32:21]
Lisa Su
They have. They have.
- [32:23]
Kara Swisher
Not initially, but then they did.
- [32:24]
Lisa Su
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 that's 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.
- [32:53]
Kara Swisher
So 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.
- [33:15]
Lisa Su
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 OpenAI models or training the GROK models, or what meta's doing with llama, you need lots and lots of GPUs. GPUs 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. And you need all of these things. There's no one size fits all in computing. You need all of the various pieces. So roadmaps are our lifeblood. We think about. When I talk about negative slack, it's like, how do I get products out to market faster? We're very 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 think about from year to year. We're going to see like a 35 times improvement in performance.
- [34:18]
Kara Swisher
In performance of these chips.
- [34:19]
Lisa Su
Yeah. So that's pretty cool, these GPUs. That's correct.
- [34:22]
Kara Swisher
That's correct.
- [34:22]
Lisa Su
That's correct.
- [34:23]
Kara Swisher
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?
- [34:30]
Lisa Su
That's a side question. She Asked.
- [34:32]
Kara Swisher
Yeah, you know, like I've got 10, 10,000? No, I've got 20,000.
- [34:36]
No, I put 100,000 together.
- [34:38]
Like it's so strange.
- [34:41]
Lisa Su
I don't even know how to answer that question. How should I answer that question?
- [34:44]
Kara Swisher
I mean, I'm good with big, but what you must be like, oh, stop it, boys. I mean, I know you do.
- [34:56]
Lisa Su
You know what I'm like? I'm like, if you need GPUs, I can help you.
- [35:00]
Kara Swisher
Yes, that's what I said.
- [35:03]
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. 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. But talk a little bit about that. Because they want to control their destiny.
- [35:34]
Lisa Su
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 the semiconductor industry or the semiconductor capability is so important. As you think about long term sort of business resiliency, 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. Our 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 it may not run the next model as well as the general purpose chips will run them.
- [36:55]
Kara Swisher
Right. But so you don't see it as a threat to your.
- [36:58]
Lisa Su
I see it as a fact of life and there's more than enough market to go after.
- [37:02]
Kara Swisher
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 who are 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.
- [37:26]
Lisa Su
Yeah, I would say I'm not, 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 interests is actually a great thing. The government has been a big funder of that. Frankly, the private sector probably should do more than we do today. And we need to work through this and ensure that there's a good pipeline of students. 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.
- [38:17]
Kara Swisher
How under siege do you think that is right now? It could ruin a whole generation of scientists, whether it's healthcare or tech.
- [38:25]
Lisa Su
I'm certainly hoping it doesn't do that.
- [38:27]
Kara Swisher
How do you prevent that? Do you have to step in? Do companies have to step into this?
- [38:31]
Lisa Su
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. Relatively small dollars. 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.
- [39:07]
Kara Swisher
But no one can replace government in.
- [39:09]
Lisa Su
The future for sure.
- [39:10]
Kara Swisher
For sure.
- [39:11]
Lisa Su
I think, look, all of these things are cycles. I don't, I don't want to overreact to any given cycle. I think the long term interests are us must continue to lead. And there's multiple aspects of what US leadership include. It includes work that we have to do in the private sector, it 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. We all know that there are efficiencies to be gathered, but. But fundamentally university research is very important, very important.
- [39:46]
Kara Swisher
So I'm gonna go on to the next thing, which is you grew up in New York, but many top tech CEOs with immigrant roofs first came to the US for college or grad school. I'm thinking of Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Microsoft, CEO Satya Nadella Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, IBM's Arvind Krishna, and yes, Elon Musk. Many have come to this country, to name a few. And so many. Just there's so many everywhere. The Trump administration's been targeting some foreign students, although that's moving back and forth trying to 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've invented things in this country, it's really pretty much it's heavily oriented towards people who have come from elsewhere.
- [40:31]
Lisa Su
Yeah, absolutely. I think the US was the place to come.
- [40:35]
Kara Swisher
Right.
- [40:36]
Lisa Su
It was the place to come to go to school and the place to come to do bleeding edge technology. And I think we would like it to stay that way. So certainly 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.
- [40:53]
Kara Swisher
What do you do to stop this particular trend from happening? How do you lobby against that?
- [40:59]
Because I just heard from three major.
- [41:02]
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. That'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, other. Many other countries.
- [41:29]
Lisa Su
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. Forever. And it's been one of those things. But look, 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.
- [41:55]
Kara Swisher
I have never heard these people say this. This is something 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 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 or do you feel. Someone told me I'm saying a lot of things just recently, a pretty high ranking, well, very high ranking CEO. Tech CEO. I'm saying a lot of things privately, Kara. 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 or. 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.
- [42:42]
Lisa Su
Well, I'm sitting here with such. Yes, you are very nice reporter. I did not say, you know why?
- [42:46]
Kara Swisher
Because you have bigger CPUs than those men.
- [42:51]
Lisa Su
Look, 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, 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 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 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 out to make a headline, but 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 sort of the country goes through waves. And as you go through all those waves, our job is to run a good company. Better than run a good company, run a great company and continue to be the best at what we do.
- [43:57]
Kara Swisher
Is tech spending too much time on politics? You've seen the impact on Musk's companies, for example. And it's not only. It's 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. And 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.
- [44:25]
Lisa Su
By the way, Tesla's a customer and they're good customers. So look, 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, 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 they were much more entwined in sort of the national economy. We weren't. You guys just keep doing what you're doing. Now. We are absolutely in the middle of sort of the national economy, sort of the national security. And so yes, we need to spend more time. And that doesn't mean you're not going to see me sort of on the.
- [45:32]
Kara Swisher
COVID It's a chainsaw for Lisa Sue. Right, sorry. I'm not going to make you insult Elon. Go ahead.
- [45:37]
Lisa Su
It's not about being seen, but it is about being heard. And I've learned this notion of whereas the semiconductor dynamics of supply chains and manufacturing dynamics and design dynamics are second nature to us, for 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.
- [46:10]
Kara Swisher
Right. It seems like often a giant waste. It's exhausting to a lot of people who are interested in the technology itself.
- [46:16]
Lisa Su
Well, I don't think I'm good at it.
- [46:17]
Kara Swisher
Right.
- [46:18]
Lisa Su
Anything that you're not great at, you find a little bit exhausting.
- [46:20]
Kara Swisher
They're not good at it either.
- [46:22]
Lisa Su
But you're learning and you're learning how to make an impact on something that's very important for the country.
- [46:27]
Kara Swisher
Okay, 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 a 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 TIME CEO of the Year in 2024. This is my complimentary period when AMD had a record year.
- [46:52]
Lisa Su
You should start with this. Right.
- [46:53]
Kara Swisher
But your stock, like a lot of stock, has had a tough time this year. 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 is 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 values, I mean, Nvidia got hit hard. People don't know what to make of these things. So how do you look at that?
- [47:28]
Lisa Su
Yeah, so I look at it a couple different ways. First of all, we cannot sort of rank our own value based on what the market is doing on any given day. And I tell my employees that, 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.
- [47:48]
Kara Swisher
Growth.
- [47:49]
Lisa Su
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. I know that sounds really like.
- [48:16]
Kara Swisher
No, I believe you actually. So I don't believe most of them.
- [48:17]
Lisa Su
No, no, no. But no, I really mean that.
- [48:19]
Kara Swisher
No, I think you do believe.
- [48:21]
Lisa Su
I really, like, why am I in tech? Like, why am I in semiconductors? It's for that reason. Cause I believe the stuff that we're.
- [48:25]
Kara Swisher
Doing, they're dead sexy, as you noted. But go ahead.
- [48:28]
Lisa Su
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, but AI is a piece of a larger story of how do we use tech to make the lives of billions of people better.
- [48:54]
Kara Swisher
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?
- [49:09]
Lisa Su
I guess I think people are spending too much time trying to predict exactly what's gonna happen in the short term. The bucket, is it bubble? Is it digestion? What's the latest model? Is some model going to come out and change the world? When 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. There is no answer. I think where it's underappreciated is how early we are in the cycle. Cycle. It's really underappreciated that we are two years in a 10 plus year cycle. That the AI that we are 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.
- [50:23]
Kara Swisher
So my very last question. Be a big visionary here. What's a thing that you would love to see it do? That it would.
- [50:29]
Lisa Su
I can't say cure cancer.
- [50:32]
Kara Swisher
You can, but I don't believe you. But.
- [50:37]
Lisa Su
I, 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 customer service agents and here, let me get your ticket. Yes, these kinds of things. I think about AI as PhD researchers that are helping us solve the next set of problems that we have. And I don't believe that they're taking over people's jobs. 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.
- [51:17]
Kara Swisher
And of your things that you're most nervous about. So that's techno optimist, techno nervous.
- [51:25]
Lisa Su
Techno nervous is that we, we get too scared of the technology.
- [51:33]
Kara Swisher
Meaning.
- [51:34]
Lisa Su
Meaning I know there's this whole conversation about how much to regulate, how much not to regulate.
- [51:39]
Kara Swisher
And a lot of very important AI researchers are part of that. It's not just crazy people or Hollywood.
- [51:46]
Lisa Su
But I think you can work through those things. I really believe you can work through those things. So one shouldn't be too afraid of it. One shouldn't slow down. Like that's, that's my belief.
- [51:56]
Kara Swisher
All right, everybody, please listen.
- [52:08]
On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro, Russell, Kateri Yocum, Dave Shaw, Megan Burney, Megan Cunane, and Kalyn Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Clare Cronin and Eric Lithke. 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 the 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. We'll be back on Monday with more that.