CEO of $210 billion company expects employees to work after midnight, holds meetings on weekends

Lisa Su is the CEO of AMD. She was born in Taiwan and moved to the US at when she was 3. (Image credit: AFP)

Lisa Su, 55, is the head of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) — a  $210 billion chipmaking company that rivals Intel and Nvidia. She became the CEO in 2014 and has dramatically grown her company since and was also named TIME’s 2024 CEO of the year. To run her company, Su has set extremely high expectations for her employees including working well past midnight and attending meetings on weekends.

“I don’t believe leaders are born. I believe leaders are trained,” she told TIME. “People are really motivated by ambitious goals... The previous strategy of, ‘Hey, let’s just do a little bit better here and there’ — that’s actually less motivational.... We needed to bet on what we were good at.” She also doesn't believe leaders are born. "I believe leaders are trained."

Su is known for sending her executives memos after midnight and then getting on calls with them to discuss the finer points of the long documents on morning calls. Her hard-­charging style is also evident in how she frequently goes down to the lab to scrutinise prototype chips delivered from the factory. “I personally visited the labs several times,” she said.

Though leaders and executives under Su have busy schedules and long nights, employees at AMD have “good work-life balance,” according to over 400 reviews on Glassdoor, CNBC Make It reported. She also has a 95 percent approval rating as AMD’s CEO from those Glassdoor reviews.

The interview with TIME also offered insight into Su's leadership skills. Seated at AMD’s Santa Clara headquarters in a conference room where both Nvidia and Intel offices are visible through the glass, she pressed senior executives to meet the deadlines set for the specialised chips that the company sells for use in AI data centers. “We cannot miss a beat,” Su told her colleagues. “We have negative slack. Whatever we do organizationally, we cannot slow down.”