Su-Che India

When Lisa Su, Chair and CEO of semiconductor giant AMD and one of the world’s most influential business leaders, arrived in Bangalore on Thursday, she had already spent two days in India. During her visit, she had already met with Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw in Delhi, visited homegrown IT hardware maker Netweb Technologies, and, alongside AMD CTO Mark Papermaster, ceremoniously signed off on their “Make in India” Tyrone motherboard powered by AMD chips.

Her schedule hadn’t been publicised much in the media, very unlike the norm these days with all business leaders arriving in India, but her next stop carried an air of intrigue—the hallowed Indian Institute of Science (IISc). 

The purpose of her visit to IISc remained undisclosed at the time of publication, and the iconic Satish Dhawan Auditorium, where Su was to do a fireside chat, carried a mix of anticipation and tension. Young reporters, Ph.D. scholars, and IISc’s top brass waited with bated breath as Su ran well-behind schedule. Speculation ran high about what this powerhouse leader might address, especially with her communications and PR teams firmly mentioning that there would be no one-on-one interactions that evening. One had to draw a parallel with a certain billionaire, a distant cousin of hers, whose team had made similar clarifications to the media when he had visited Bangalore in 2023. However, Nvidia’s Huang did host a roundtable with journalists in the city.

As Su entered the auditorium, a serene stillness seemed to settle in the air, as if her very presence commanded the room into quiet reverence. There was a powerful calm about her, a balance of strength and tranquility that radiated with authority. Her presence was both reassuring and formidable, a perfect harmony of grace and power. 

“When I joined AMD 12 years ago, I think we were still in a place where we were looking for what’s next in computing and my interest was on driving high performance compute and building the largest and the most impactful semiconductors that we could build,” the AMD CEO said in her opening remarks. 

“As with any company, you have to decide what is most important, what do you want to be when you grow up. And our aspiration was to be the leader of high-performance computing. And to do that, we had to have very strong core CPUs, GPUs and overall architecture to make that vision a reality,” she added.

Since the beginning of her stint at AMD since 2012, Su has been nothing short of a talisman for AMD, helping the company secure landmark deals with Microsoft and Sony, which translated into AMD chips powering the iconic Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles.

However, it’s nearly impossible to discuss Su’s AMD today without invoking the USD 3.6 trillion juggernaut Jensen Huang has built with Nvidia in the AI chips race. The parallels, when drawn with the past, are striking: years ago, AMD operated in the shadow of Intel, until Lisa Su’s transformative leadership flipped the script and redefined the company’s trajectory. But the stakes are far higher this time. Nvidia has cemented its position, cornering about 80 per cent of the AI chips market. For Su, the challenge isn’t just uphill this time—it’s a battle to reshape an entire industry once again. 

In Q3 this fiscal year, AMD reported that its data centre revenue had grown by 122 per cent year-over-year (YoY), reaching USD 3.5 billion. Nvidia’s data centre revenue was about tenfold in comparison at USD 30.8 billion.

Popular opinion among industry experts is unanimous: no one is willing to bet against AMD’s chief. And there’s good reason for that. Lisa Su is not one to shy away from lofty ambitions or complex challenges – as much was evident by one of her responses to audience’s questions at IISc.

“My advice is the same one I received as a young student: set ambitious goals for yourself. At a young age, you have the potential to do just about anything,” said Su, replying to a question about the advice she would offer to younger generations.

“And the second piece of advice is: run towards problems,” she added.

Before taking the on reins at AMD, Su had honed her skills and tackled problems aplenty at tech giants like Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor. This year, Su celebrates a decade as CEO of AMD, solidifying her place as one of the most influential leaders in the semiconductor industry. 

One of bulwarks for AMD in the AI chips race is its open-source software approach, a contrast to what Nvidia is doing, which is fueled by its proprietary software ecosystem, particularly Nvidia’s CUDA (a parallel computing platform and application programming interface that allows developers to harness the power of GPUs for general-purpose computing). Su believes that the world needs an open-source, hardware-agnostic software environment. 

“It shouldn’t matter whether it’s AMD, Nvidia, or any other hardware layer,” she said. “You want to build on top of that with the software at the underlying abstraction. That’s really AMD strategy. We’re investing heavily in the tools, compilers, and abstraction layers that will enable the development of this open-source ecosystem.”

AMD’s India Focus

Much like other semiconductor giants—beginning with Texas Instruments, which pioneered the industry’s presence in India four decades ago—AMD has also established a strong foothold in the country. That relationship in the two decades here for the chipmaker has only kept growing as it inaugurated its largest design centre in Bangalore to house 3,000 engineers last year. The 5-lakh square-foot campus serves as a centre of excellence (CoE) for the development of products across high-performance CPUs for the data centre and PCs, gaming GPUs, and adaptive SoCs and FPGAs for embedded devices. This new centre is part of the company’s broader USD 400 million investment in India over five years, which was announced at Semicon 2023. 

Currently, the USD 220 billion chip giant has a workforce of about 8,000 engineers in India, primarily focused on driving innovation across the design stages of the semiconductor lifecycle – making India an important hub in the company’s overall supply chain.

Speaking on India’s semiconductor ambitions, Su commended the Modi-led government for its strategic vision. “Prime Minister Modi’s overall technology strategy, whether it’s the ‘Make in India’ initiative, the focus on semiconductors, or focus in AI, is extremely relevant and strong. When it comes to semiconductor manufacturing, those of us in the industry understand that it’s a long game. Building an ecosystem for manufacturing or even R&D takes time. The progress India has achieved in a relatively short period is truly impressive,” she said.

Su was one of the prominent US tech leaders who met Prime Minister Modi during his visit to the United States earlier this year. 

“I think starting with some of the assembly and test work makes perfect sense and then going into mature nodes before you go into advanced nodes,” she added, noting the progress and path India is taking toward semiconductor manufacturing.

Currently, five semiconductor units are in development in India with an expected investment of nearly Rs 1.5 lakh crore to deliver a combined production capacity of approximately 7 crore chips per day.

“My advice is … watching what is being done is … these types of strategies have to be played over many, many years. May be even one or two decades. And it is about building the right foundation” 

– Lisa Su, Chair and CEO at AMD on India's semiconductor manufacturing developments

Lisa Su concluded the fireside chat by noting, “Even the US has some of that manufacturing strategy. There’s no nation that can really have all of their manufacturing be indigenous. That is kind of impossible in our current world. It is such a global supply chain right now. But having some capability of in country, I think is very valuable and I think India as well on the way.”