AMD chief Lisa Su becomes first female CEO to lead company past $1 trillion market value

Lisa Su has become the first female CEO to lead a company past $1 trillion in market value after the U.S. chipmaker AMD crossed the milestone amid an AI-driven stock rally.

Lisa Su, CEO of U.S. chip maker AMD

The U.S. chipmaker reached the threshold for the first time on Sept. 21, joining a small group of companies valued above $1 trillion as investors bet on its expanding role in artificial intelligence computing, Reuters reported.

The milestone also marked a first for women in business. Other companies that have reached trillion-dollar valuations include Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Nvidia, but AMD was the first to do so under a female CEO.

"It was a pretty darn good moment," Su said when asked about the achievement at the Imperia summit hosted by U.S. first lady Melania Trump.

Oracle had previously approached the threshold under then-CEO Safra Catz, reaching a market value of about $925 billion in September 2025. AMD subsequently slipped below $1 trillion, with its market value standing at $984.4 billion when Fortune published its report on Sept. 28.

For Su, ranked the world’s third most powerful woman in business by Fortune this year, the achievement followed more than a decade of rebuilding AMD. She joined the company in 2012 and became CEO in 2014, taking charge of a chipmaker struggling financially and losing ground to rivals.

A February 2024 Forbes profile described AMD as having laid off around a quarter of its workforce, with its shares trading at roughly $2, before Su took the top job. Her strategy centered on developing stronger products, restoring customer confidence and focusing AMD on high-performance computing.

The company’s Zen processor architecture, introduced in 2017, helped revive its competitiveness against Intel. AMD later expanded its presence in servers and AI chips, positioning itself as an alternative to Nvidia as demand for computing power surged.

The turnaround made Su the first female chief executive of a major semiconductor company to become a billionaire in 2024, largely through her AMD shares and stock options. Her estimated net worth stood at $3.5 billion as of Oct. 4.

Born in Taiwan in 1969, Su moved to the U.S. with her family at age three. She earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before working at Texas Instruments, IBM and Freescale Semiconductor.

Her latest expansion pushes AMD further into AI research. On Sept. 28, the company announced an agreement to acquire World Labs, co-founded by AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion. Li is set to join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to Su.

World Labs develops AI systems that can understand and simulate three-dimensional environments. AMD said the acquisition would strengthen its ability to build chips, software and computing systems around the needs of emerging AI models and applications.