Key Notes
- Yahoo Finance named AMD chief Lisa Su its CEO of the Year on November 12.
- The award was announced on the day Nvidia publicly announced Jensen Huang’s departure.
- Su and Huang are first cousins once removed, a family relationship separated by one generation.
Yahoo Finance named Advanced Micro Devices (Nasdaq: AMD) chair and chief executive Lisa Su its CEO of the Year on Thursday, recognizing her leadership as the chipmaker expands its role in artificial intelligence.
The award was announced on November 12, the same day Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) publicly announced Jensen Huang’s departure. The two longtime competitors also share a family connection: Su and Huang are first cousins once removed.
A Big Year for AMD and Its Shareholders
Yahoo Finance’s award profile put AMD’s year-to-date stock gain at 158% as of November 12. It highlighted Su’s dealmaking, financial performance and push into the AI systems market.
Su joined AMD in January 2012 and became CEO in 2014. Her tenure has taken the company from a struggling chipmaker to a major supplier of processors for PCs, servers and AI infrastructure. She previously held engineering and business leadership roles at other semiconductor companies and earned her doctorate in electrical engineering at MIT.
How Su and Huang Are Related
Their family connection places them a generation apart. Huang’s mother and Su’s maternal grandfather were siblings, making Huang a first cousin of Su’s mother. The two executives did not grow up together.
Su acknowledged the relationship in a 2020 interview with the Consumer Technology Association, describing them as “distant relatives.” She also explained that competition did not rule out cooperation: AMD’s CPUs could work alongside Nvidia’s GPUs in PCs and data centers, even as the companies competed in graphics.
Data Center Revenue Nearly Doubles
AMD reported record third-quarter revenue of $13.4 billion on November 3, up 45% from a year earlier. Its data center business grew 97% to about $8.5 billion, helped by demand for EPYC server processors and Instinct AI accelerators.
The company’s forecast called for fourth-quarter sales of about $17 billion, plus or minus 3%. The midpoint would represent growth of roughly 66% from a year earlier and 27% from the third quarter.
