Lisa Su at the WIRED Conference
This year, WIRED magazine’s Big Interview conference was held in San Francisco, and one of its main stars was Lisa Su, CEO of AMD. She spoke there with senior editor Lauren Goode and shared many interesting thoughts about artificial intelligence, which is now transforming the entire technology world. Lisa Su has led AMD since 2014, and during that time she has managed to give the company a major boost. AMD’s market value has risen from $2 billion (approximately CZK 46 billion) to $300 billion (approximately CZK 6.9 trillion). That is a huge leap, showing how well AMD is doing in the field of chips for computers and now especially for artificial intelligence.
Lauren Goode asked Lisa Su directly whether the technology industry was in an AI bubble. Lisa Su answered firmly: definitely not, from her perspective. She said that these concerns were somewhat overblown. The artificial intelligence industry will need a huge number of chips from companies like AMD, and she believes this is only the beginning. Lisa Su is known for her courage—she always goes all in on things she sees as opportunities.
Big Bets on AI
AMD is now betting heavily that the world will need more computing power for artificial intelligence. That means building data centers where these systems run. Lisa Su spoke about how artificial intelligence is still in its infancy. The models we have today are good, but the next ones will be even better. That is why AMD wants to keep pushing the technology forward and ensure that its chips are ready for the future. It is not just about sales, but about putting artificial intelligence into the hands of as many people and companies as possible.
One of the major challenges is selling chips to China. Lisa Su confirmed that AMD will pay the 15% tax imposed by the Donald Trump administration on MI308 chips, which the company plans to resume shipping to China. Sales had previously been halted by the US government, but this summer, the authorities began reviewing applications again. AMD previously announced that these export restrictions had cost it roughly $800 million (approximately CZK 18.4 billion). Nevertheless, it sees potential in this market, and the company is trying to navigate these obstacles.
The OpenAI Deal and Competition
A major success for AMD is its recent agreement with OpenAI. Under the agreement, OpenAI will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD Instinct GPU chips over several years. As part of this deal, AMD agreed to let OpenAI purchase 160 million shares in the company for just one penny per share, or $0.01. This gives OpenAI a stake of roughly 10% in AMD. The first gigawatt is expected to be deployed in the second half of next year.
Lisa Su is not afraid of competition. AMD is still smaller than Nvidia, whose market value is $4.4 trillion, while AMD is worth $353 billion. But Lisa Su said she is not worried about Nvidia, Google, or Amazon, which are developing their own chips. What really occupies her is the question of how to innovate faster. She wants AMD to always be one step ahead in what it brings to market.
Lisa Su believes that the potential in this field is enormous and that there is no reason to stop pushing forward. The WIRED conference where all of this took place also featured other interesting guests, such as Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei and Jon M. Chu, director of the film Wicked. But Lisa Su truly stood out with her optimism about artificial intelligence.
Sources: wired.com and tomshardware.com
