Abstract:
AMD CEO Lisa Su delivered an impressive report card in 2026. Her career choices and efforts over the past 15 years have also been fully reflected in this year. Su Zifeng said at the Yahoo Finance Invest Summit: "I joined AMD because I wanted to be a member of a company that is truly at the forefront of technology. I firmly believe that technology can bring huge positive impacts to the economy and the world, and I want to be part of it."
She continued: "If you fast forward 10 years, I think it's safe to say that we are pushing the frontier of technology. Some of the technologies we have are amazing and we are driving some of the most important technological advances in the world."
Su Zifeng’s performance at the helm of AMD over the past year has been outstanding. This is not the first time she has achieved such results. But 2026 is obviously a little different.
From reaching a major transformative deal for AMD, to delivering performance that exceeded market expectations on the day of the financial report, to receiving the National Medal of Science from US President Trump, and participating in many high-profile international high-level meetings, Su Zifeng demonstrated the most outstanding leadership skills in recent years this year, and her previous performance was already good enough.
AMD investors also received handsome returns. Despite the sharp sell-off in technology stocks after the U.S. election day, AMD's stock price still rose 158% during the year.
In comparison, the share price of rivals Nvidia (NVDA) fell 7% during the year, and Broadcom (AVGO) fell less than 1%. During the same period, the S&P 500 rose 11% and the Nasdaq Composite rose 10%.
Based on the above performance, Yahoo Finance awarded Su Zifeng the highly regarded "CEO of the Year" award.
Su Zifeng’s highlights in 2026
When Su Zifeng joined AMD as a senior manager in 2012, the chip company was already on the verge of bankruptcy.
Since becoming CEO in 2014, Su Zifeng has completely changed AMD and built it into Nvidia's strongest competitor.
In recent years, she has driven the company to complete a number of major transactions, including the acquisition of Xilinx and a partnership with Meta. According to relevant arrangements, Meta may hold up to 10% of AMD's shares in the future.
However, Su Zifeng’s performance in 2026 is more like a perfect corporate executive report card-at least in the eyes of investors, almost everything is going smoothly.
One of the eye-catching moves is that AMD spent $8.2 billion to acquire World Labs, acquiring this company with true AI innovation capabilities. World Labs focuses on the development of 3D environment-related software.
World Labs was founded in 2024 and is led by Fei-Fei Li, a well-known artificial intelligence researcher. Li Feifei is known as the "Godmother of AI" in the technology community and once served as the chief scientist of Google Cloud.
After the transaction is completed, Feifei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist. She will report directly to Su Zifeng, which also highlights her key position in AMD's future development.
AMD’s market capitalization exceeded the $1 trillion mark for the first time in late September.
Currently, AMD’s market value has fallen back to US$906 billion. This reflects more the selling pressure sweeping the market after the U.S. midterm elections than problems with Su Zifeng’s operational execution capabilities.
In fact, just a few weeks ago, AMD released a strong third-quarter financial report, with both revenue and adjusted earnings per share exceeding market expectations.
In the third quarter, AMD's revenue increased 45% year-on-year to a record $13.38 billion, significantly higher than Wall Street analysts' expectations of approximately $13.06 billion.
Adjusted earnings per share increased 74% year-over-year to $2.09, which also easily exceeded analysts' expectations of $1.94.
The outstanding performance was mainly due to the strong performance of AMD's data center business. Driven by strong demand for EPYC server processors and the gradual expansion of production scale of the Instinct MI450 AI accelerator, data center business revenue increased by 97% year-on-year to a record $8.5 billion.
For the fourth quarter, AMD expects data center business revenue to increase by 50% sequentially. Looking forward to 2027, Su Zifeng expects the company's revenue to grow by more than 80%, with server business revenue expected to double and data center AI business revenue to more than double.
HSBC analyst John Vinh said: "We are firmly optimistic about AMD's refreshed product roadmap strategy, and the market's recognition of its products is also convincing. However, the market's expectations for AMD to increase market share and achieve growth are already high. We are worried that if the actual performance is even slightly lower than expected, considering that AMD's current valuation level is much higher than that of its peers, it may also bring considerable risks to its stock price."
In a year of outstanding performance, AMD also released a new generation of AI chips. Its core products include the Instinct MI450 series GPU and the sixth-generation EPYC Venice CPU.
These new chips are designed to provide computing power support for AMD's new Helios rack-level AI system. The system integrates GPU, CPU, network equipment and software into an integrated platform for training and running large-scale AI models, directly challenging Nvidia's dominance in the AI field.
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