Lisa Su, AMD’s David to Intel’s Goliath

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Born in Taiwan, Su got her doctorate at MIT before stints at Texas Instruments Inc. and IBM Corp. She took over AMD in 2014. Five years later, the company isn’t going to unseat Intel, which has 96.6% of the $16.5 billion server processor market, anytime soon. But Su’s steady hand has made AMD a credible alternative for big customers that have long relied on the industry giant. For 30 years, Intel has led the way in improving chips’ capacity and performance while lowering costs. But when the company botched a 2017 rollout of processors—with some parts measuring only 10 nanometers thick—Su had an opening. AMD announced in August that its 7-nanometer-thick server chips were ready to order and that Google’s cloud service was already using them. Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. are customers, too.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Bret Begun at bbegun@bloomberg.net, Jeremy Keehn

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