Su Zifeng saved AMD, now she wants to compete with Huang Renxun for dominance in AI

News on June 5, as CEO of AMD, Su Zifeng has helped the semiconductor manufacturer, which was once on the verge of bankruptcy, out of the crisis and pushed its stock price to less than 10 It has increased nearly 30 times in a year. Now she's preparing for the coming AI revolution, competing with Nvidia for supremacy, and she's confident she can win.

In Santa Clara, California, USA, in the conference room on top of the AMD headquarters building, Su Zifeng manages this company that is older than Silicon Valley. Walking down Highway 101 next to the building, you can witness AMD's history, including the old wafer fab in Sunnyvale, where AMD once produced chips. Through the window of the conference room, Su Zifeng can also see the office building of Intel, AMD's old enemy. However, Intel's current market value is approximately US$120.3 billion, which has been surpassed by AMD (US$153.5 billion).

Just a few years ago, the situation was completely different. In 2014, when 46-year-old Su Zifeng took over as CEO of AMD, the chipmaker was on the verge of bankruptcy. The company laid off about a quarter of its employees, and its stock price is hovering around $2. Former AMD executive Patrick Moorhead once said the company would be "totally dead."

However, Intel has also started to struggle due to manufacturing delays and Apple's decision not to use its chips in iPhones. With a keen strategic vision, Su Zifeng immediately seized on the mistakes of his opponents and reached cooperation agreements with laptop manufacturers such as Lenovo, gaming giant Sony, and technology giants such as Google and Amazon. The chipmaker's massive data center business brought in $6 billion in revenue last year.

Intel’s annual revenue is US$63 billion, compared with AMD’s US$23.6 billion, which still pales in comparison. But Su stole her Silicon Valley neighbor's coveted server chip market share and bought semiconductor company Xilinx, causing AMD's stock price to soar nearly 30 times in the nine years since Su took over. .

Add artificial intelligence to every AMD product

With the popularity of artificial intelligence, people’s demand for the “silicon brain” behind machine learning is growing. Su Zifeng faces in this field With a huge opportunity and a daunting challenge: Can AMD produce a chip powerful enough to break Nvidia's near monopoly on the GPU market? NVIDIA has laid the foundation for the current wave of artificial intelligence technology. In this regard, Su Zifeng said: "Looking at the next five years, you will see traces of artificial intelligence in every AMD product, and it will become AMD's biggest growth driver."

In the past For nine years, Su Zifeng has been overloading AMD, just like gamers trying to push processors beyond the performance limits specified by the manufacturer. Unlike many technology executives, Su Zifeng is also a senior researcher with a PhD in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The combination of technical talent, people skills and business acumen have made her one of the highest-paid CEOs of S&P 500 companies over the past few years, with total compensation in 2022 reaching $30.2 million.

Overall, Su has amassed a fortune of $740 million (mainly in AMD stock), which ranks her 34th on Forbes magazine's annual list of the richest women in the United States. Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay lamented: "She simply worked hard to the extreme and finally showed herself perfectly." When Panay first met Su Zifeng in 2014, she began to launch AMD's transformation.

However, unlike Intel, whose revenue fell 12% to $63.1 billion in three years, Nvidia still seems to be the leader in the industry. In addition to delivering stunning graphics in games like Cyberpunk 2077, Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs) have become the engine of choice for artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI. OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT can give surprisingly humane answers, exciting and disturbing the public.

Although these so-called large language models are very rudimentary, they are the beginning of the transformation of artificial intelligence. Bill Gates and others said that this will be as significant as the birth of the Internet. Currently, there is already huge demand in the market for GPUs required for artificial intelligence. More than one research company predicts that the related market size will reach US$400 billion in the next ten years. But now only Nvidia can provide this chip.

Forrester analyst Glenn O'donnell said: "Artificial intelligence is equivalent to Nvidia. This concept has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. AMD must really take action to change this."

Meanwhile, the threat from Intel remains looming over Highway 101, even as the company faces challenges such as manufacturing delays, defective chips and leadership changes. AMD executive Forrest Norrod helped Dell build a data center business worth about $10 billion (2014 revenue) on AMD chips. He added: "AMD has a lot of advantages, but the bad thing is that we have two world-class competitors. I never think that the main competitor will always sink, we always assume that Intel will solve this problem."

Just do three things

When Su Zifeng was appointed CEO of AMD in 2014, some analysts believed that the company was "not worth investing in." Because at that time AMD had $2.2 billion in debt and some important assets had been sold. AMD's chip fabs were spun off in 2009. Company co-founder Jerry Sanders once boasted that "real men want fabs." This was undoubtedly a heavy blow. In 2013, AMD even had to sell and lease back its campus in Austin, Texas.

What’s even more disturbing is that AMD’s execution is also quite poor. It has struggled to meet deadlines with scheduled products, and Intel dominates the laptop market while Nvidia, Qualcomm and Samsung carve up the nascent smartphone market. Su Zifeng admitted: "Our technology was not competitive at the time."

However, AMD has not always caused such a headache for investors. Sanders entered the microprocessor industry in the early 1980s, making chips for IBM. But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, things began to change. AMD, perennially in the second tier, began generating record profits by producing processors that were faster than Intel.

But by 2014, those glory days began to fade, and Su’s predecessor, Rory Reed, laid off about a quarter of AMD’s employees. Although AMD once had about a quarter of the server chip market, which was worth $24 billion at the time, that fell to 2% in 2014.

The day after becoming CEO, Su Zifeng gave a morale-boosting call to all employees: “I believe we can make the best products.” She later said that maybe people would It felt obvious, but the company didn't realize it at the time.

Su Zifeng’s slogan sounded the clarion call for AMD’s counterattack and was also the first step in her three-pronged approach to solving the problem: she decided to create excellent products, deepen customer trust and streamline the company. Su Zifeng said: "For the sake of simplicity, I only arranged these three things, because if it were five or ten items, it would be difficult to achieve."

Su Zifeng asked the engineers to refocus on manufacturing beyond Intel's chips, but it could take chip designers years to draw up a viable final blueprint. AMD's share of the server market fell further, leaving only 0.5%. But researchers work quietly in the lab. Su Zifeng said: "At the time, the company was not doing well, but gosh, they were working on the most exciting designs in the industry. Engineers are motivated by the product, and I like to keep it that way."

Su Zifeng decided to prioritize a new chip architecture called Zen. That decision paid off when it finally launched in 2017. "It's really great," she said proudly, adding that Zen's calculations are more than 50 percent faster than previous designs. More importantly, it sends a signal to the industry that AMD has turned a corner. By the time the third generation of Zen was released in 2020, it was already the market leader in terms of speed. The Zen architecture now powers all of AMD's processors.

As her team spearheaded the development of a new generation of chips, Su began marketing them to data center customers. Even when AMD had no chips to sell, she spent years building connections. On one occasion, Su drove more than four hours through a Texas snowstorm to attract Antonio Neri, the current CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. "It's fair to say that I'm disenchanted with the older generation at AMD, but she's shown me that she's confident in what needs to be done," Neri said.

# Part of Su Zifeng’s strategy is to sign new agreements with technology giants, because these giants need large amounts of CPUs to support their explosive cloud computing business. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said: "For us, there are actually three microprocessor partners, namely Nvidia, Intel and AMD. When I joined, AMD was not An important part of our ecosystem. But now, they are a very important partner for us, and this is all due to Su Zifeng."

Last February, when AMD’s market value surpassed Intel’s for the first time, Sanders, the 86-year-old co-founder of the company, said ecstatically: “I called everyone I knew! I was Not quite in my right mind, my only regret is that Andy Grove is not around!" Grove served as AMD CEO but died in 2016.

Su Zifeng was born in Tainan, Taiwan, China in 1969. His father was a mathematician who worked as a bookkeeper and later became an entrepreneur. That same year, Sanders founded AMD. When Su Zifeng was 3 years old, her family immigrated to New York. She chose electrical engineering from MIT because it seemed like the hardest major. For someone so technically gifted, she was also good at working with people, said Hank Smith, who ran MIT's Nanostructures Laboratory at the time. When disagreements arise between classmates, she plays the role of peacemaker.

When hearing that she was called a sociable person, Su Zifeng laughed and joked: "Compared to other people at MIT, it does seem that way. I thought no one I would say I am an extrovert, but communication is an important part of my job."

Su Zifeng briefly worked at Texas Instruments and was hired as an IBM researcher in 1995. There, she helped design a chip that used copper circuits instead of traditional aluminum circuits, making the chip run 20 percent faster. Senior executives quickly discovered Su Zifeng's talent. In 1999, a year after the introduction of copper circuit technology, then-IBM CEO Lou Gerstner appointed her as a technical assistant.

In his first interview in 20 years, Gerstner told Forbes that at first, he was worried that Su Zifeng was not qualified enough for the job, but his doubts soon disappeared. "She has proven herself to be one of the most outstanding employees in my office. Zifeng does not follow the rules and has been breaking the mold throughout her career."

That appointment made Su Zifeng a Those who have experienced corporate transformation have now become one of the classic cases in business schools: revival mainly relies on the advantages of the company's size and a culture focused on customers. In the nearly nine years Su Zifeng has been in charge of IBM, the company's market value has increased nearly six times. In 2001, she signed a joint agreement with Sony and Toshiba to implant IBM's chips into Sony's PlayStation 3 game console.

At the beginning, Su Zifeng sometimes worried that she was not qualified to sit at the negotiating table with business leaders. But she soon realized that being more sensitive to technology trends gave her an advantage over the average executive. In 2017, Su Zifeng said in her graduation speech at her alma mater: "I noticed that MIT PhDs also work for Harvard MBAs, but it is not important to me." Today, MIT's New Nano The technical laboratory is named after Su Zifeng.

The idol of young engineers, the hero of investors

At the end of 2011, Nick Donofrio, then a member of the board of directors of AMD, called Su Zifeng. Austin-based chipmaker Free-Scale, which is now part of NXP, serves as senior vice president. When the two had dinner, Donorio put forward his own idea, hoping that Su Zifeng would join AMD. This would not only be an opportunity to pursue incremental improvements, but also an opportunity to reinvent and innovate.

A few days later, Su Zifeng accepted the position of senior vice president of AMD’s global business unit. Two years later, she was running the entire company, becoming the first female CEO of a major semiconductor company. She recalls her early days as an engineer: "I walked into a room of about 25 people, and I was probably the only woman. I was interested in young female engineers and encouraged them to continue pursuing engineering careers."

When she first took over AMD, Su Zifeng flew to Beverly Hills and personally invited AMD founder Jerry Sanders to communicate with her team. Sanders said he was moved by Su Zifeng's proposal, but he ultimately declined. He said at the time: "This is not my team now, this is yours." But as a former salesman, Sanders also gave a counter-offer: Once the company achieves profitability for two consecutive years, he will visit . In 2019, which coincided with the 50th anniversary of AMD, Sanders fulfilled his promise.

Semiconductor industry genius Mark Papermaster once led Apple’s iPhone and iPod engineering teams. After joining AMD at about the same time as Su Zifeng, he has been paying close attention to the company’s leadership under her leadership. Return to glory. At Apple, Peppermaster worked for corporate turnaround guru Steve Jobs, who saved the company from disaster and grew it into the world's most valuable company. Peppermaster said: "In many ways, Su's task is more difficult. If you are not a founder, you have to establish your credibility and vision and bring the entire company, customers and investors to the Come here."

Su Zifeng led AMD to success, making her an idol for young engineers and investors also regarded her as a hero. It's even turned her into a meme: A few years ago, an animation of her using AMD's Ryzen chip to transform into a superhero and shoot lasers from her eyes went viral on Twitter. On a shelf in her office is a small figurine wearing orange-red armor and a helmet, a gift from a fan at the E3 gaming convention. Su Zifeng said: "This is probably one of the funniest moments in my career." Although she is a loyal user of Twitter and Reddit, she is not "a big fan of memes, it's not my thing!"

Don’t worry about customers turning into competitors

Now, Su Zifeng has given AMD a new lease of life, and she has set her sights on a highly competitive market to ensure the company’s future. At the same time, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang is working hard to make his company the preferred supplier of artificial intelligence computing power.

Huang Renxun is a distant relative of Su Zifeng. He saw that selling chips to artificial intelligence projects such as ChatGPT was a huge business opportunity once in a lifetime. NVIDIA's stock price has soared to an all-time high due to the surge in demand, with a forward price-to-earnings ratio of about 64 times, almost twice that of AMD. Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Bernstein, said: "This is also why investors are paying attention to AMD. They want to get Nvidia at a more affordable price. Maybe the market is big enough and they don't need too much competition. ."

Su Zifeng has this idea. She hopes to improve AMD's status by updating chips every year and compete with Nvidia's H100 chip. Under her leadership, AMD's R&D spending nearly quadrupled to $5 billion, nearly equal to all of AMD's revenue when she took office.

Su Zifeng supports the new supercomputer project of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA. When it is completed in 2022, it will be the fastest supercomputer in the world and can perform 10 billion calculations per second. , is also a perfect display of AMD artificial intelligence chips. In addition, Su Zifeng also launched the MI300 chip, which combines CPU and GPU to compete with Nvidia's new super chip, and is expected to ship later this year.

Su Zifeng has also been fighting against Nvidia through acquisitions. For example, in 2022, it spent US$48.8 billion to acquire Xilinx, a company that produces programmable processors. This helps speed up tasks like video compression. As part of the deal, former Xilinx CEO Victor Peng became AMD's president and head of artificial intelligence strategy.

In addition to Nvidia, AMD also faces other emerging threats: Some of the company's customers have begun to develop their own chips, aiming to reduce their dependence on the semiconductor giant. For example, Amazon designed a server chip for its AWS business in 2018. Google has spent nearly a decade developing its own artificial intelligence chips, called TPUs (Tensor Processing Units), to help "read" the names of signs captured by its Street View cameras and for the company's chatbots Bard provides the power. Even Meta plans to develop its own AI hardware.

Su Zifeng is not worried about the trend that customers may become competitors. "It's natural for companies to want to make their own components as they seek to improve operational efficiencies," she said. "But they can only do so much without AMD's decades of technical expertise. I don't think any of our customers It is unlikely to copy the entire ecosystem."

In the artificial intelligence chip market, Su Zifeng occupies a favorable position. But she's well aware that transformation can quickly turn into decline. She has more work to do to ensure AMD continues to stay ahead. She said: "I think AMD has another stage. We have to prove that we are a good company. I think we have done that. Proving again that you are great and you have made lasting contributions to the world, these are the things that have made me proud They are all interesting questions."

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