Lisa Su

Why Lisa is the canonical Infrastructure Landlord

Lisa Su holds a BS, MS, and PhD in electrical engineering from MIT, where she was among the first researchers to explore silicon-on-insulator technology — a then-unproven approach to building faster, more efficient transistors. After doctoral work at IBM solving the copper-interconnect contamination problem that became an industry standard in 1998, she rose to VP of IBM's Semiconductor Research and Development Center before moving through Freescale and into AMD.

She was appointed AMD's president and CEO in October 2014, inheriting a company with a market capitalisation of roughly $3 billion and a product line that had fallen years behind Intel and Nvidia. Over the following decade she rebuilt AMD's CPU and GPU roadmap around the Zen architecture and the CDNA/RDNA GPU families — Ryzen for consumer PCs, EPYC for datacenters, and Instinct accelerators for AI training — driving AMD's market cap past $700 billion and, for the first time, past Intel's. The same silicon infrastructure that every AI hyperscaler, cloud provider, and gaming console runs on flows through AMD's fabs and partnerships.

As an Infrastructure Landlord, Su's position is structurally indifferent to which AI application wins: every model trained, every inference served, every gamer rendering a frame needs the underlying compute substrate she rebuilt from near-bankruptcy. She received the IEEE Robert Noyce Medal in 2021 — the first woman to do so — and was named Time CEO of the Year twice (2014 and 2024). Her cousin Jensen Huang leads Nvidia, the other dominant landlord of the AI compute layer.

The Infrastructure Landlord the 'shovel sellers' — earns regardless of which end-products succeed. See the Infrastructure Landlord role →

Same role, different wave