So Lisa actually has a bachelor's, master's and PhD in engineering, all from MIT. I spent a lot of time in school. And when you find something you like, you stick with it. That's right. Okay, so five years ago, you became the CEO of AMD, and the company was in a very different spot back then. Are declining share price and kind of struggling to find its place in the market that's really dominated by very few very large players. And today you're one of the best performing stocks in less than P500 so, give us a quick. [ APPLAUSE ] Thank you. [ APPLAUSE ] Quick, quick glimpse into the keys of the turnaround at AMD. Yeah, absolutely. And first of all, thank you so much for having me. It's really an honor to be here. And AMD is a company that's been around for 50 years, but we've never quite hit our stride. And five years ago, This was an opportunity for me it was actually my dream job to run a semiconductor company. And many people would say, well, why would you wanna do that? [ LAUGH ] It's what every little girl wants. Yeah that's right [ LAUGH ] It's the idea that you can make something you can build products. You can put it on the shelf and somebody will buy it and will know that it's yours. And the key for us was really you know, it's a it's an industry where you have to make bets over the long term. So the bed sometimes take three years to pay off sometimes take five years to pay off and Wall Street is a very fickle and hard to hard to keep the attention span but I think we really focused we decided. Hey. We were gonna focus on great products. And it was gonna take us three years to get the next products out. And we had to be very, very clear on what we were not gonna do. Which is, you know, sort of change our strategy. And that focus which you you talk about, you know, you're focusing on certain products means you're not focusing on others. And that's not just a product decision. It's a personal Decision that has an impact. How did you get everybody in line with that renewed focus ,? Extreme communication, extreme communication in terms of, I think, this morning was discussed like you say something like 75 times and then you have to say it another 75 But it was very much around we are about our products we are about our customers and we are about simplifying everything that we do. So that you know so that everyone in the company is clear on what our strategy is. And for those of us who are not in the semiconductor industry, just give a sense of What those areas are that you chose to focus on. So, we are focused on products that are really for high performance computing. So the idea that we're all about how we get more efficient data centers or the large. Piece of things that are going to grow in the future and our focus is on building really powerful computers. Okay, you have. That means we don't do small things. Right, like what? Like we're not in my phone, but we might be in your PC and we might be in your data center. That is, you know, powering your cloud. And because of that, you have a host of new customers that didn't exist for AMD before you took over. So talk a little bit about that. I mean Amazon's AWS, Oracle, Twitter, what do you do for them? Yeah, what was really important to me when I took over as CEO was how did we have sort of large brands associated with what we do? Because My feeling was, if if we can get the most marquee customers using AMD products and that was validation. So, for example, we're powering some of Google's data centers today. So if you're running some applications on Google, you may be running on AMD. And we're working with Twitter. I'm a big twitter fan I don't know how many of you are but thats one of the things that- Its double edged sword. Wellonces in a whie yes yes. You know e are Micro soft new surface laptop. And those are you know my key brands where Relationships were really built over you know any years to get there. And I think everybody in this room has to make bets owards the future but in your business its way towards the future and so how do you, whats the process of amking those bets? Who do you have around you thats helping you to make those decision that this is the next big market for Our products. What's really important in in our world is really getting close to the people who are doing the engineering. So I'm an engineer at heart. And I actually spend quite a bit of time with our chief engineers and architects to understand where they think the future is going. And like I said, it's all about making bets. Sometimes you make the wrong bets, and hopefully most of the times you make the right bets, but the important thing is sticking to those bets. Because the life- cycle of semiconductors are so long. Do you miss being an engenier? Do I miss being an engenier? Sometimes, sometimes I miss being an engenier, but I have the luxury of being able to go into the labs and see what we're doing at any given time. So that a span. You have a lot of them around you. Yes. And how has the background of being an engineer, how has it helped and maybe hindered in some ways your transition into being a CEO? Well, I think for tech companies having some intuition about what you're trying to do is helpful. And so certainly for me, it's been helpful I've had to learn about the business on the job and so I've made sort of my share of mistakes doing that. But from the mentally understanding, I thought what the major said was interesting. Like flying is a great equalizer. I think engineering is a great equalizer because either the product works or it doesn't work. There's no in between. That's sort of how I look at it. Okay, I'm gonna switch to a slightly tougher topic for you, for all of us, I think, today. Which is China and the trade war. So, you have started back in 2016. You started a joint venture in China to license your technology there and that was put that organization that joint venture was blacklisted by our government. Just this summer I think we're all very foot, we think about Huawei and and maybe a few other companies, but there are many companies that have been impacted by this. So what is this turn of events mean for that joint venture Venture and for the future of your business overall in China. When you look at US China relations, it is a very, very complex topic. And we do maybe 30 % of our business in China. So it's a large market for us. And the way we think about it is. Like the world is different today than it was four five years ago. I think the you know the thoughts round how do you balance both access to the market which is one of the largest market in the world. But also the fact that you know there are national securities concerns as it relates to high tech. And for our case we are making some of the most powerful processors in the world And we wanna sure they're used for good things. And so it's an adjustment. But it's an adjustment that we are very prepared to make and the most important thing is to make sure that we're focused on our strengths which are around high performance computing. So if you take a step back, do you think that we should be, At this moment exporting computing, technology computing power to China to begin with. Well, I think there are lots of different things that we do trade with China and there are certain aspects of our technology that are really, really special. And we should protect those really, really special things as much as possible. And then realize that, for leadership in the US markets, we still need access to the largest markets in the world. And where do you? So two questions I guess, where do you see your hope things are going, if you. if you look into your crystal ball, and then the other question, you can answer whichever one you want first, but I think, obviously one of the hardest things with the current. Climate and the trade war is the uncertainty and the unpredictability of these twists and turns. And so how do you lead through that especially at a company that it has very direct, large impact? Well, I think what's really exciting to me is there's just so much you can do with technology. And there's so many applications that we can address, you know, whether we talk about, you know, sort of very geeky stuff but if you think about what we can do to. You're transform, you know, medicine and education and you know, you know, address climate change and all these things you really need powerful computers. And that's what we build. And so that's that's the really exciting thing. And then your your second question about just How do we navigate these waters? I think we're all in the same place. We're all in the same place like every day we wake up and there could be something different that you're addressing. And that's the life of a CEO or Senior Executive. And I think we get used to that I, one of the things that I'm most. Focused on is ensuring that we are very agile as a company like we have 10, 000 people. It's not a small company, but it's not a huge company. And the idea is how can we make 10, 000 people be able to turn on a dime. As market conditions change and as customer needs change. Ok and I'm going to turn to you guys for questions but one more question on China side, just to clarify and give more context, we're not talking about just chips that are going into You know, consumer PCs or whatnot. The concern has been around chips that are going high, high, high performance chips that are going into supercomputers right, and some of those supercomputers are used by the Chinese government for various means. So just give a sense of like what these supercomputers can do. For better or worse? Well, I think the real opportunity is super computers will allow you to really simulate things before they happen. And that allows us to predict much better. And some areas it's business problems, other areas it's how do you predict the weather and you know some areas are, Are weapons related. From our standpoint, again it's really exciting to be at the forefront of technology. One of the areas that we're most excited about is AMD was just awarded the next generation highest performance supercomputer for the United States. So Oakridge national labs We'll be building a, not that you need to know this, but a one- and- half extra flop computer that does lots and lots of things and it will be using our processors since we're very proud of that. And we just need to make sure that we keep pushing the envelope And I know we got very excited about the 50 most powerful women but there's actually a list of 50, the top 50 super computers in the world so that's very exciting in your world I know. That's right. [ LAUGH ] We all get excited about different things so. All right. Questions from you guys, please raise your hand if you would like to ask Lisa a question. Over here, can we get a microphone? And if you could introduce yourself real fast. Hello, Lisa, thank you for being here. My name is Leah Sweet from PayPal, so in a tech industry. I'm curious how you balance innovation with the long lead times that you have for your new technology. As your competition moves forward, as the dynamics of the industry change, you have to be able to change as you said on a dime a large organization to focus on new and innovative products. But at the same time, you have extensive lead times in development and so you have to have a significant amount of time reserved for that. How do you handle that balance? Yeah, it's a very interesting balance what, what we do is, you know, we really take sort of two aspects of it one is there is just foundation right? There's, foundational intellectual property, that you know you have to invest in and you know you have to be the best at and and that hardly ever changes. And then you have what is more customer driven. And one of the things that I find is you learn so much from every conversation about what's going on in the market and what customers need. And so we're able to adjust late in the cycle, sort of what we do With individual customers. But that foundational IP and that innovation has to really stand there. I'm gonna give one last very, very quick question. I've always wondered how you guys name your chip lines. You've got Matisse and Picasso and Rome and Naples. So how does that work? Okay, so here's what I would say. The large brands I actually weigh in on. It's like one of the most fun things like the marketing guys will come in with like 50 names. And I'll say ike one of our big product lines is a name called rise. Raison. And it plays off of Zen which is a very sort of balanced system. When I first heard about that I thought, my God, I'm gonna call it raisen by mistake. [ LAUGH ] [ INAUDIBLE ] But the other stuff that we let engineers do it we are a company of engineers and the engineers name the individual product. Branding experts. That's right. [ LAUGH ] All right. Well, thank you so much, Lisa. Thank you so much for having me.

How Lisa Su Turned Around AMD

Leadership

We talk to Su about her leadership at Advanced Micro Devices.
