(1) The AI boom has given NVIDIA a taste of sweetness, and its market value has exceeded trillions of dollars. And NVIDIA's old rival AMD is still trying to find a breakthrough, and AMD CEO Su Zifeng has also unabashedly expressed his ambition to win the "NVIDIA AI crown".
(2) Su Zifeng was at the helm of AMD for nine years, planning a great transformation of "salted fish turnover", which turned the bankrupt semiconductor manufacturer around, and its stock price increased nearly 30 times in less than a decade.
(3) At present, Su Zifeng's secret weapon in this artificial intelligence race is the upcoming official release of the chip Instinct MI300 for artificial intelligence model training, competing with NVIDIA for customers.
Huang Jenxun and Su Zifeng are Chinese, and they are distant relatives. (According to Taiwanese media reports, Su Zifeng's grandfather and Huang Jenxun's mother are brothers and sisters)
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With the generative AI boom, the competition in the graphics card battlefield continues. Nvidia tasted the sweetness, and its market value once exceeded $1 trillion. As an old rival of NVIDIA, AMD is still trying to find a breakthrough. Its stock price has soared 30 times in the past decade, and it also wants to reproduce the headwind reversal of the year and get a place in the field of AI chips.
At CES 2023, AMD exhibited a new flagship acceleration processor, the Instinct MI300, which can be used for artificial intelligence computing. The product packs up to 13 chiplets, some of which use 3D stacking to increase density, for a total of about 146 billion transistors. Next week (June 13), AMD will hold a press conference to officially release the latest processor MI300.
The MI300 has been called "the world's first CPU+GPU integrated in a data center," and Su said the chip can shorten the inference modeling process from months to weeks. Some industry insiders said that the launch of MI300 is also aimed at a market dominated by NVIDIA, and the launch of new AI chips also shows AMD's "declaration of war": to grab customers with NVIDIA.
According to MoneyDJ, as the conference approaches, analysts from American institutions are optimistic about AMD. Harsh Kumar, an analyst at research firm Piper Sandler, also said he expects AMD Instinct MI300 to contribute more than $200 million in revenue to AMD in the fourth quarter. Many investors are waiting for next week's conference, looking forward to another round of confrontation between AMD and NVIDIA, and in a recent interview with foreign media, Su also unabashedly expressed his ambition to win the "NVIDIA AI crown".
In fact, AMD orchestrated a great transformation in the history of Silicon Valley, turning the bankrupt semiconductor manufacturer around, and its stock price increased nearly 30 times in less than a decade. Next, she is preparing for the upcoming AI revolution and expects to continue the legend.
When Su Zifeng, 53, took over as AMD's CEO in 2014, the chipmaker was at rock bottom. The company has laid off about a quarter of its workforce, and its share is hovering around $2. Former AMD executive Patrick Moorhead recalled that the situation could only be described as "exhausted." At that point, Intel began to struggle due to production delays and Apple's decision not to use its chips on the iPhone. Su Zifeng seized this opportunity and, with a keen strategic eye and taking advantage of the mistakes of competitors, reached agreements with laptop maker Lenovo, gaming giant Sony, and Google, Amazon, etc. The two tech giants' sprawling data centers generated $6 billion in sales for AMD last year.
In fact, in the nine years since Su Zifeng took over AMD, AMD snatched server chip market share from its "Silicon Valley neighbor" Intel and acquired semiconductor company Xilinx, which caused AMD's stock price to soar nearly 30 times. Now, as the mainstream of AI stoke the need for the chip brains behind machine learning, she faces a historic opportunity and a daunting challenge: Can AMD produce chips powerful enough to break NVIDIA's near-monopoly in the coming wave of generative AI?
1/ Nine years at the helm, from splitting up and selling to reviving AMD
For the past nine years, like a gaming enthusiast setting processor performance beyond the limits set by the manufacturer, Su Zifeng has been "overclocking" AMD (the method of increasing the clock speed of an electronic accessory to a higher speed than the manufacturer has set to improve performance). Unlike many tech executives, she is a world-class research scholar with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her perfect combination of technical flair, interpersonal skills, and business acumen has made her one of the highest-paid CEOs in the S&P 500 (total compensation of $30.2 million in 2022). All told, she has amassed a fortune of $740 million (mostly AMD stock) and ranks 34th on Forbes' annual list of America's richest businesswomen.
Despite the company's heavy losses, high debt, and potential bankruptcy, becoming CEO of chipmaker AMD is a dream job for Su. Su told the media: "I have spent my career in the semiconductor field and am a well-known large American semiconductor company. I'm really excited to be CEO. She loves to be able to walk around Best Buy and pick out a laptop knowing that a microchip or processor made by her company is powering it.
Not everyone will be so enthusiastic. When Sue took over as AMD's helm in 2014, the company's stock price was heading for record lows. But Sue, now one of the most influential women in tech, loves a challenge. She says that's why she became an engineer in the first place. She must make bold bets — some of which will take five years to see returns — to turn AMD's game around.
These technologies dominated in 2020. But Su Zifeng must start laying the foundation in 2014. "The reason it takes so long is because it's so complicated," Su said. Our latest data center chips actually have 40 billion transistors... You have to be completely error-free, which requires a lot of engineering work. ”
When Su rose to the top of AMD's position in 2014, analysts called the company "not worth investing," with $2.2 billion in debt and some important assets even being split up for sale. Its chip fabs ("fabs" in industry jargon) were spun off in 2009, a blow to the boast that AMD co-founder Jerry Sanders said "real men have fabs." In 2013, AMD even had to sell and lease back its corporate campus in Austin, Texas, which is Suzifeng's current base.
Even worse, AMD struggles to execute. It can't release products on time, and Intel dominates the new smartphone business in the laptop market, in addition to the low-end segment, along with Nvidia, Qualcomm and Samsung. Su Zifeng admitted: "At that time, our technology was not competitive. ”
AMD hasn't always been a headache for investors. Sanders entered the microprocessor business in the '80s to make chips for IBM, but in the late '90s and early 2000s, things started to change. AMD, which has always been a minor player, began to create record-breaking profits by manufacturing self-developed processors that exceeded Intel's processing speed.
By 2014, those glory days were long gone. Just as Su's former CEO, Rory Read (Sanders, who stepped down as CEO in 2002), laid off about a quarter of its workforce, AMD once had about a quarter of today's $24 billion server chip market. But in 2014, its share fell to 2%. On her second day as CEO, Sue stood in front of the microphone during an all-staff conference call to deliver a message to demoralized AMD employees: "I believe we can build the best product," she recalled telling employees: "You might think it was obvious, but it wasn't for the company at the time." ”
However, at the same time, AMD's other big rival, Nvidia, has become a leader in the industry. In addition to presenting stunning graphics in games like Cyberpunk 2077, its GPUs have become the engine of choice for AI companies like OpenAI, and its chatbot ChatGPT has mixed public joy when it answers questions and commands with a startling anthropomorphic voice.
With the current opening show of artificial intelligence transformation, Bill Gates and others have said that artificial intelligence transformation will be as important as the birth of the Internet. There is already a huge demand for GPUs to power AI, and some research firms have predicted that the companies that make GPUs will make a huge profit of $400 billion in the next decade, but now there is actually only one company. "AI is NVIDIA," Forrester analyst Glenn O'Donnell said, "and this is entrenched, and AMD must really improve its capabilities to overcome this." "
AMD's annual revenue of $23.6 billion in 2022 is still dwarfed by Intel's annual revenue of $63 billion. Intel's shadow still hangs over Highway 101. Even as the ancestor of the personal computer, it faced manufacturing delays, chip defects, and leadership changes.
AMD executive Forrest Norrod said: "AMD has many advantages, but unfortunately, we have two world-class competitors." Norrod helped build Dell's data center business worth about $10 billion (2014 revenue), relying in part on AMD chips, and he said that AMD never thought its competitors would keep the problem going. "We always thought Intel would solve these problems."
This inspiring call also led her to revive AMD: to build great products, deepen customer trust, and simplify the company's operations. "Those three things are keeping it simple," she said. "Because if it's five or ten, it's too hard."
Su has her engineers refocused on building chips that surpass Intel, but it could take years for chip designers to draw a final blueprint that works. While researchers toiled in the lab, AMD's share of the server market fell further to 5 percent. "Even though the company was deteriorating, they were doing the most exciting design work in the industry," she says. "Engineers are motivated by the product, and I like to put that at the forefront."
In addition, Su Zifeng decided to prioritize a new chip architecture called Zen, which was finally launched in 2017. She proudly said, "Zen's computing speed is more than 50% faster than the company's previous design chips, which is really good." More importantly, it sends a signal to the industry that AMD is turning the corner. By the time the third-generation Zen was released in 2020, it was the market leader in terms of speed. The Zen architecture supports all of AMD's processors.
As her team spearheaded the development of a new generation of chips, Su began tirelessly marketing these chips to data center customers. Even when AMD had no chips to sell, she had spent years networking, once driving more than four hours through a Texas hailstorm to get along with Antonio Neri, the current CEO of HP, "and I can say that I have no illusions about AMD's previous generation," Neri said. "But she showed me her perseverance and conviction."
An important part of Su's strategy is signing new cooperation agreements with tech giants that need large amounts of CPUs to support their explosive cloud business. "For us, there are actually three microprocessor partners, Nvidia, Intel and AMD." Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said. "When I joined Google, AMD was not an important part of our ecosystem at all, and now AMD is a very important partner for us, which is a credit to Su Zifeng."
Last February, when AMD's market capitalization first surpassed Intel's, co-founder Sanders, now 86, was ecstatic. "I called everyone I know!" He said. "I was delirium. My only regret is that Andy Grove wasn't around, so I could have said, 'Aha! I didn't expect it! (Grove was Intel's legendary former CEO who died in 2016.)
In 1969, the same year that Sanders founded AMD, Su Zifeng was born in Tainan, Taiwan, the daughter of a mathematician and an accountant, who immigrated to New York City with her family at the age of 3 and chose to study electrical engineering at MIT because it seemed to be the most difficult major. Hank Smith, who was in charge of MIT's nanostructures lab at the time, said that as a technology genius, she was also very good at dealing with relationships, and when there were disagreements between classmates, she would act as a messenger of peace.
AMD co-founder Jerry Sanders (pictured above in 1979) is known as a bragging salesman in the early days of Silicon Valley. Sanders said: "People think I'm just blowing hard and not actually capable, and if that's true, then AMD won't last that long." ”
Su Zifeng laughed when she heard that she was described as "getting along well with people". She joked, "Well, that's relative to other MIT guys." She added: "I don't think anyone would say I'm an extrovert, but communication is a big part of my job. ”
After a stint at Texas Instruments, in 1995 she was hired as a researcher at IBM, where she helped design a chip that ran 20 percent faster by using copper circuits instead of traditional aluminum circuits. Executives quickly discovered her talent: In 1999, a year after the introduction of copper technology, IBM CEO Lou Gerstner appointed her as his technical assistant. In his first interview 20 years later, Gerstner told Forbes that he was initially worried that Su's qualifications were too shallow, but his doubts were quickly dispelled. "She turned out to be one of the most prominent employees I've ever worked in my office. She never conforms – she's been breaking the mold all her life."
The appointment gave Su the opportunity to witness first-hand a corporate transformation that is now one of the classic examples of business schools – a transformation that has been achieved in part by relying on the size of the company and creating a culture focused on the customer. In his nearly 9 years at the helm, Gerstner increased the stagnant IBM's market value by nearly sixfold. She also got a taste of the deal, helping IBM sign a joint deal with Sony and Toshiba in 2001 to use its chips for Sony's PlayStation 3.
Early on, she sometimes worried that she wasn't qualified to sit alongside the business giants, but Su quickly realized that the technical knowledge she had learned gave her an edge over those at the executive level. In her 2017 commencement speech at her alma mater, she said: "I saw MIT Ph.D. working for an MBA at Harvard Business School, when in fact, it didn't make sense to me at all. Today, Harvard's new Nanotechnology Laboratory is also named after her.
In late 2011, Nick Donofrio, then a member of AMD's board of directors, called Su, who had met at IBM when he was already a senior vice president at chipmaker Free-scale (the Austin-based chipmaker has now been integrated into NXP Semiconductors). The two had dinner, accompanied by a bottle of Brunello wine, and Nick Donofrio said to Sue: "Join AMD, it's not just an opportunity to pursue incremental improvements, it's an opportunity to re-innovate and innovate, and you and AMD have the foundation to achieve that." ”
A few days later, Su Zifeng accepted the position of senior vice president of AMD's global business unit. Two years after she joined, she began managing the entire company — making her the first female CEO of a major semiconductor company.
Recalling her early days as an engineer, she said: "Even if I was the only woman in a room of 25, I would not hesitate to walk in. I strongly encourage young female engineers to stay in the engineering field. ”
When Su Zifeng first took over, she flew to Beverly Hills to personally invite AMD's Mr. Sanders to talk to her team. Sanders recalled that Su's invitation touched him, but he declined it, telling her "it's no longer my team, it's yours." But as a salesman, he also offered a quid pro quo: once the company was profitable for two years in a row, he would visit him personally. In 2019, the company's 50th anniversary, Sanders delivered on that promise.
Semiconductor boss Mark Papermaster, under the leadership of Su Zifeng, has witnessed AMD's amazing transformation. Having led Apple's iPhone and iPod engineering teams, he joined AMD, which Su had around the same time and worked for another transformational "artist," Steve Jobs, who saved Apple from extinction and made it the most valuable company in the world. "In many ways, Lisa's task is more difficult," Papermaster said. "If you're not a founder, you have to build your credibility and vision and lead the entire company, customers and investors forward together."
Su's success at AMD has made her a role model for young engineers and admired by investors, which has also made her a meme (Internet buzzword, referring to memes). A few years ago, 8-bit animations about Sue using AMD's Ryzen chip to transform into a superhero or shoot lasers from his eyes went viral on Twitter. On her office bookshelf, a statuette in her image wearing orange-red armor and helmet next to her was a very prominent gift from a fan at E3. "This was probably one of the most interesting moments of my career," Sue said, "and while I'm a big user of Twitter and Reddit, I'm not 'keen on memes.'" It's not my thing. ”
At present, Su Zifeng is "confronting" Nvidia in the artificial intelligence war. Her secret weapon: the Instinct MI300 (pictured), a chip that blends a traditional CPU with a GPU processor often used in gaming.
2/ Competition with NVIDIA
AMD's war with Nvidia has not stopped since the end of the 90s. AMD is an even older company with a history dating back to the late 50s (founded on May 1, 1959). The competition of Nvidia is only about one of AMD, but this new player has become the hegemon of the graphics card industry.
Su has breathed new life into AMD, and she is focused on securing its future in a competitive market. While she is working to rebuild her business, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang is also working to make his company the go-to supplier of AI computing power.
Huang, a distant relative of Su (according to Taiwanese media reports, Su's grandfather and Huang's mother are brothers and sisters), see selling chips to support AI tools like ChatGPT as a "gold mine." Demand for chips by artificial intelligence has pushed Nvidia's stock to near all-time highs, with an expected price-to-earnings ratio of about 64 times, almost double AMD's. Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon said: "That's why investors are looking at AMD. Because they want 'poor man's version of Nvidia,'" Bernstein analyst Stacey Rasgon said. "Maybe the market is too big and they don't need to compete with each other."
But Sue intends to compete. She hopes to challenge the AI-centric Nvidia H100 GPU by betting on annual chip upgrades to boost AMD's position. Under her leadership, R&D spending increased nearly fourfold to $5 billion, almost equal to all of her revenue when she took over AMD.
A new supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA, is the brainchild of Sue, which will be the fastest computer in the world when it is completed in 2022. Built to have processing power of at least a quadrillion computation per second, this groundbreaking machine is a showcase for AMD's AI chips. She also whetted everyone's appetite: The MI300 chip, which will be launched this year, will fuse CPUs and GPUs to counter Nvidia's new superchips.
Industry insiders believe that AMD has not escaped competition, but based on its own CPU advantages, it has chosen to focus on APU and form differentiated competition with NVIDIA's core product A100/H100. AMD's next-generation product, the MI300APU chip, integrates a CPU and GPU, has 146 billion transistors, and also contains 128GB of video memory.
She has also fought against Nvidia through acquisitions such as the $48.8 billion acquisition of Xilinx in 2022, a company that makes programmable processors that help speed up tasks such as video compression. As part of the deal, Victor Peng, former CEO of Xilinx, became AMD's president and head of AI strategy.
In addition to Nvidia, there are other emerging threats: some AMD customers have begun to develop their own chips in order to reduce their dependence on the semiconductor giant. Amazon, for example, designed a server chip for its AWS business in 2018; Google has spent nearly a decade developing its own artificial intelligence chip, Tensor Processing Units, to help "read" the names of signs captured by its mobile Street View cameras and to provide powerful computing power for the company's Bard chatbot. Even Meta plans to develop its own AI hardware.
Sue dismisses concerns that her clients could one day become competitors. As companies seek to improve efficiency in their operations, wanting to develop their own hardware is a natural behavior, she said. But she believes there's a limit to what they can do without the technical expertise AMD has built up over decades. "I don't think it's possible for any one of our customers to replicate the entire ecosystem."
In the artificial intelligence chip market, Su occupies a favorable position. But she knows that turnarounds can quickly turn into failures. There's more work to be done to make sure AMD lasts, she said: "I think there's another phase to AMD. We have to prove ourselves to be a good company, and I think we've done that. As for how to prove my greatness again and make a lasting contribution to the world, this is an interesting question for me. ”