Lisa Su
Appearances
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Look at all these people who are here in the evening.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
And yes, there's a piece of this that says, you know, we need to also protect our crown jewels. And we want to be part of that conversation. And the part of the conversation is, you know, these rules are actually very detailed. Like, 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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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 line.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
I don't know that we need to focus on, you know, was it cheap?
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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. If you put constraints on a problem, people will find a way to engineer around it. I'll give you an example. There was a time when AMD was much, much smaller. People used to say to me, Lisa, are you crazy?
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
I think that's what we saw a bit with the DeepSeek 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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
It forwarded something that I really believed, which is, Two things. One is that there are lots of ways to solve problems. And, you know, you learn different ways. The second thing, which actually was really positive, is that we saw the power of open source. Like, I'm a big, big believer in open source because it allows people to collaborate on a problem.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
And what you saw with DeepSeek is, you know, put aside DeepSeek being a Chinese lab. You know, DeepSeek was an open source model that And now you see, like, every research group learning from some of the techniques of DeepSeq to make their models better. And I actually thought that was really cool.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Like, we saw in the realm of a short number of weeks people, you know, kind of changing the way they thought about deepseq. you know, adding some innovation from what they learned.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
You know, 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, you know, at the end of the day, we have to spend like 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?
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
to continue that trend that we have and recognize that, yes, there's competition out there.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
I don't know that I would say it's more competitive. I would say that, you know, in the grand scheme of things, I'm not a big believer in decoupling of ecosystems. I actually think, you know, we work in China. We learn a lot from that interaction. I think, you know, we have teams in China. And so, you know, my view of the world is there's a good opportunity for
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
to recognize that there should be some limitations, but also the ability to continue to have an integrated... Yeah, I'm a big fan of not decoupling either.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Don't you guys love Kara? I mean, like...
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
That'll distract me, Carrie.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Chips Act is good. I thought the Chips Act was pretty historic in the sense that, you know, for semiconductors to get to the level that it requires industrial policy for the United States, that's a big thing. That's a big thing.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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 the US. Because it's expensive, the chaos involved.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
It's expensive. And frankly, I mean, we're all human beings, right? 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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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 you know, sort of several years as we've started bringing some of the manufacturing back to the United States.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Like TSMC has now said on record that their yields and capability in Arizona are as good as, you know, 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, like, yeah, actually, you can bring advanced manufacturing back to the U.S., and it's a good thing to do. Now, we need much more of it.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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, you know, let's call it eggs in the U.S. basket, make perfect sense. Right. It is more expensive. We just have to realize that it's more expensive. But the resiliency aspect of it and the sovereignty aspect of it make for good business.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
And that has been a change in people's mindsets.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Yes, I think it does. I think there was a time when sort of 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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
But by the way, I don't think we can bring everything back to the U.S. That's also not practical. But having a good portion of manufacturing here in the U.S. and around the world gives us resiliency in the business, which is a good thing.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
I mean, there's some, you know, amazing, you know, startups that are coming out of, you know, the Stanford's, the MIT's, the Berkeley's, the John Hopkins of the world that are really coming up with really good ideas.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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. I'm a big believer in healthcare and life sciences and that...
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
I'm not going to say it's going to solve cancer, but I'm going to say it's going to do a lot. Absolutely.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
It's going to do a lot for drug discovery. It's amazing.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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 because we want to be the enabler of this technology.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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 sexy, it was the idea that... They're still not really sexy, but go ahead. Well, you're talking to me, so they're not terrible, right? I mean... Okay, sexy.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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. And so what we see today is exactly that, right? I mean, the cloud is powering so many things, and we continue to be the underpinnings of the cloud environment going forward.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
So that's kind of... the view of wide 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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
That's why we acquired ZT Systems, a great system company that allows us to put together more of the components. And then to your conversation or question earlier, About open versus closed, you know, I guess I'm a believer in, like, choice is a good thing. Like, people want choice. People don't only want one choice. People want the ability to choose kind of what their systems should look like.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
And it's almost a little bit like if you look at the phone industry, you know, Apple has a very vertically integrated system between hardware, software systems, ecosystem. And then you look at the Google Android ecosystem. 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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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 an ecosystem.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
It seems like forever ago, yes.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
It's like 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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Yeah, so the AI accelerator market, you know, you might hear it called GPUs. I mean, think about this as truly the foundation. Like, when you think about, you know, training the OpenAI models or training the Grok models or, you know, 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. Mm-hmm.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
versus CPUs, which are more, let's call it traditional compute. And I'm a believer in 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. 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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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, you know, think about from year to year, we're going to see like a 35 times improvement in performance.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Yeah, so that's pretty cool.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
That's the side question she asked me.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
You know what I'm like? I'm like, if you need GPUs, I can help you. Yes. That's what I said. Okay.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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 like the semiconductor industry or the semiconductor capability is so important as you think about, you know, long term. sort of business resiliencies.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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. Like we
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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. Right, but so you don't see it as a threat to your...
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
I see it as a fact of life, and there's more than enough market to go after.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Yeah, I would say I'm 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. So
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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 we also continue, let's call it, leading-edge research that is, let's call it, not necessarily tied to
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Well, first of all, Cara, it's great to be here. Great to see everybody in the audience. I like talking about chips. You're going to see that from me.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
I'm certainly hoping it doesn't do that.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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. Everybody wants GPUs.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
We give a lot of universities hardware because we want them to learn on our capabilities. Computing is expensive. And so there are places where, you know, we can do more and we should do more. But no one can replace government. For sure. For sure. I think, look, all of these things are cycles. I don't want to overreact to any given cycle. I think the long term interests are, you know, U.S.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
I started in the chip industry. I mean, I'm going to date myself, but I've been in the chip industry for 30 years. And back when I went to school, chips were not exciting. Why did you do it? You were at MIT. I was at MIT. It was cool at MIT, but okay. It wasn't even that cool. It was sort of cool at MIT, but not like amazingly cool. All right.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
must continue to lead. And there's multiple aspects of what U.S. 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, right?
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
We all know that there are efficiencies to be gathered, but fundamentally, university research is very important.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Yeah, absolutely. I think the U.S. was the place to come, right? It was the place to come to go to school and the place to come to do, you know, bleeding edge technology. And I think we would like it to stay that way. So certainly, you know, 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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Yeah, no, look, I think we all agree that, you know, this is an important topic and it needs to be, you know, it's always a pretty difficult issue to address. I mean, we've been talking about high-skilled immigration, you know, Forever. Forever. And it's been one of those things.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
But 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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
She's like, yeah, right.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Well, I'm sitting here with such a very nice reporter.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
But, you know, it's the idea that hard, like I like hardware. I like to build things. And so the idea of chips, you know, 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, you know, a lot of people were like, hey, software, that's a much more exciting field. So it's kind of,
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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. Like, I can't. Because... And every day that we have, yes, we all read things, we all do things.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
But at the end of the day, I spend, you know, 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, you know, this is how do we be, let's call it, not necessarily polarizing. So you can say I'm diplomatic.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
I wouldn't use the word diplomatic, but I'm not like, 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, you know, the world and, you know, sort of the country goes through waves and, and, As you go through all those waves, our job is to run a good company.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Better than run a good company, run a great company. And continue to be the best at what we do.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
By the way, Tesla is a customer, and they're a good customer. 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, right? Because you just went through the litany of the reasons why.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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 the national economy. We weren't.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
You guys just keep doing what you're doing. Now we are absolutely in the middle of the national economy, the national security. And so, yes, we need to spend more time. And that doesn't mean you're not going to see me There's no chainsaw for Lisa Su, right? Sorry, I'm not going to make you insult Elon. Go ahead. It's not about being seen, but it is about being heard.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
And I've learned this notion of not, you know, 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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
foundational to say that right now chips are really, you know, sort of the underpinnings of this entire tech community, you know, where AI is going. And, you know, that's one of the things that I do feel very fortunate about, that I'm in an industry that makes, you know, that much of a difference. Now back to, you know, how do I think about these things? I mean,
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Now let me help be part of the solution and not just be someone lobbying for my company.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Well, I don't think I'm good at it.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Anything that you're not great at, you find a little bit exhausting.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
But you're learning, and you're learning how to make an impact on something that's very important for the country.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Yeah. So I look at it a couple of different ways. First of all, you know, we cannot... rank our own value based on what the market is doing on any given day. 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. Frankly, it's all about long-term growth.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
For us as a tech company, it's all about the product roadmap. 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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
I know that sounds really like... No, I believe you, actually. I don't believe most. No, no, no, but... No, like, I really mean that. No, I think you do believe. I really, like, why am I in tech? Like, why am I in semiconductors? It's for that reason, because I believe the stuff that we're doing... Because they're dead sexy, as you noted, but go ahead.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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. Like, I'm... super excited about what we have in front of us.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
I think people are spending too much time trying to predict exactly what's going to happen in the short term. The bubble. Yes. 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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
You've seen these technology arcs, Cara. They go in waves, you know, let's call it tenure 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 like one of those waves. But, you know, I would say that it's probably the biggest wave that I've seen in my career because it has so much potential.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
There is no answer. I think where it's underappreciated, is how early we are in the cycle. Like it's really underappreciated that we are Two years in a 10-plus year cycle. That the AI that we're 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...
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
business model innovation. And for, you know, us as, you know, sort of people experiencing AI, it's about, you know, making, you know, our lives, you know, just better.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
You know, that it would... I can't say cure cancer.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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 like customer service agents. Right, here, let me get your ticket. Yes, these kinds of things.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Like, I think about AI as, you know, PhD researchers that are helping us solve the next, you know, set of problems that we have. And I don't believe that they're taking over people's jobs. I 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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Techno-nervous is that we get too scared of the technology. Hmm. Yeah.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Meaning, you know, I know there's this whole conversation about how much to regulate, how much not to regulate. Yeah, and a lot of very important AI researchers are part of that.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
No, but I think you can work through those things. Like, 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 my belief. All right, everybody. Thank you.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
So, yeah, that chat GPT moment was a very special moment. Why was that? 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 chat GPT moment unlocked was that, wow, Now everybody can interact with AI.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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 of programming languages and things like that. I think that moment just unlocked the fact that if we can make computers easier to use,
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
then we can get so much more productivity, capability, actually sort of new opportunity.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
So I still think we're in the very early innings of usage. I would say, you know, 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, you know, companies, we think about companies trying to use AI to become more productive, right?
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Okay, how do I make something that is right now very manual and very labor-intensive workable? you know, 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 know, you first had companies just using the internet, and then you had companies that were truly changing their business model because of the internet.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
I think you're going to see the same thing in AI. And we see that in our own work, too. I asked it to write a tooth fairy letter. Okay.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
It should have done a little better than that. No, it really didn't.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
I'm going to see which model you're using. It should have done better than that.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
We are not sitting in the corner crying. We are recognizing that semiconductors are now very high priority lists on sort of all national agendas. And that is new. As nationalist agenda that is key to the security of the United States. That is definitely new. I would say 10 years ago that wasn't the case. Five years ago, maybe a little bit.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
But sort of 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-term bets. 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.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
So we have to keep pushing the envelope on new innovation. That doesn't change. What does change are a few things, right? 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, right? Supply chain resiliency becomes really top of mind. So when, for example, during the pandemic timeframe, that was a completely unexpected thing.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
I think we talked about it then. Yes, exactly. And when that came up, it was like, people were like, why can't I get chips for cars? And it's like, well, you know what? It's because it's a nine 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.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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, you know, 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.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
So, you know, the focus on trying to bring more manufacturing back to the United States, I think we're all in favor of that. Like, that's a positive, right? And just put it in the resiliency category, which is... Nine to 10 years.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
It will take— If at all. It will take certainly five to ten years. And 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. Mm-hmm. And there's so many steps. It's such a complex supply chain that you just have to plan every step of that.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
We've certainly talked about tariffs. the implications of tariffs and what that would do overall.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
But that's why I'm not 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 U.S., 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.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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 the matter of years. And we're here to...
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
be as good a U.S. company as we can be, knowing that these things will have some impacts. The way I look at it, though, Kara, is these are a 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. But it's a shock to your system.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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 U.S. 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. And so I think those are kind of the key high-level bullet points that are really important.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
If you look at the top 10 supercomputers in the world, you know, 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.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
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 our job is to make sure that we are
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
really spending time with those who are making these decisions that they understand.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
Yeah, and I think those are fine. Like, those haven't changed.
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AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
When you say, is it appropriate? Look, I think we... 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.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
I think a lot of it is intelligence about the market. So there are two ways to approach, I think, leadership in 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.
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
we want the U.S. 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?
Pivot
AMD CEO Lisa Su on the “Dead Sexy” AI Chips Race - On with Kara Swisher
How do we collaborate better with our customers faster? And that's Probably where we want to spend, like, the majority of our time. Where you'd like to spend more time. Yes, and also that would be our recommendation to the administration, frankly. We should spend the majority of our time thinking about how do we as a country go faster.