Here's a fact that sounds made up but isn't: the CEO of AMD and the CEO of Nvidia are cousins. Not distant, need-a-genealogist-to-prove-it cousins. Actual, share-grandparents, saw-each-other-at-family-reunions cousins. Lisa Su runs AMD, a $250 billion semiconductor company that spent most of its existence as the scrappy underdog everyone counted out. Jensen Huang runs Nvidia, a $4 trillion colossus that has become the most important company in the AI revolution and, depending on the day, the most valuable company on planet Earth.
One of them built a technological empire so dominant that every major tech company on the planet is begging to buy its chips. The other took over a company so broken it was worth less than what Facebook paid for WhatsApp, and through a combination of brilliant engineering, ruthless strategy, and what I can only describe as weaponized patience, turned it into the only credible threat to her cousin's throne.
If you invested $10,000 in AMD in 2014 when Lisa Su became CEO, you'd be sitting on roughly $600,000 today. That's a 60x return. Not from some pre-IPO lottery ticket or a meme stock pump, but from a CEO who systematically dismantled every assumption the industry had about what AMD could be.
And yet the story isn't over. It might not even be in the third act. Because the AI chip market — the market Lisa Su is betting AMD's entire future on — is still in its infancy. And what happens next will determine whether AMD becomes a trillion-dollar company or whether Jensen Huang's empire is simply too massive, too entrenched, and too brilliantly constructed for even family to compete.
Let me walk you through how this happened, why the numbers are both extraordinary and terrifying, and why the answer to "who wins?" might not be "either/or" but something far more interesting.
The PhD Who Became a Corporate Assassin
Lisa Su's origin story is one of those quiet, academic beginnings that you only recognize as the first chapter of an epic in hindsight. Born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1969, she moved to New York as a child with parents who emphasized education with the kind of intensity that leaves no room for debate. Her father was a statistician. Her mother, an entrepreneur. By the time she was a teenager, she was already taking things apart — calculators, clock radios, whatever she could get her hands on — with the specific goal of understanding how they worked.
She went to MIT. Obviously. And while she was there, pursuing a PhD in electrical engineering, she published a research paper that seemed, at the time, like the kind of thing only other electrical engineers would care about. The paper dealt with silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology — essentially, a way to make transistors faster and more power-efficient by building them on a thin layer of insulating material instead of directly on bulk silicon.