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Earlier this year, Wired He said that AMD CEO Lisa Su He was “For Nvidia’s bloodThe US chipmaker is still small compared to the juggernaut that is Nvidia, with market caps of $353 billion and $4.4 trillion respectively, but Su’s company is gaining ground. Today, when Su took the stage at WIRED’s Big Interview conference in San Francisco, she had something else in mind: Artificial intelligence bubble.
When I asked WIRED senior writer Lauren Goode if the tech industry was in an AI bubble, her response was, “Absolutely, in my view, no.” The AI industry will need dozens of chips from companies like AMD, and Su says fears of such a bubble are “somewhat exaggerated.”
That may sound bold, but boldness is all that matters to Sue. Since becoming CEO of AMD in 2014, she has increased the company’s market value from $2 billion to $300 billion. Now, Su is betting big on the need for more AI computing power, and the data centers needed to provide it.
However, there are still a lot of hurdles ahead for AMD. One is to build all those data centers, and the other is to get its chips into the hands of as many customers as possible. During the discussion, Goode asked AMD CEO about selling chips to China. It confirmed that AMD will pay a 15 percent tax imposed by the Trump administration on MI308 chips that it plans to resume shipping to China. The US government had previously halted chip sales to China, but then began reviewing orders again over the summer. AMD said earlier this year that US export restrictions on MI308 chips would cost the company about $800 million.
Earlier this year, AMD Make a huge deal With OpenAI, under which the AI company will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct GPUs over several years. As part of the deal, AMD agreed to let OpenAI buy 160 million shares of the company’s stock for a penny per share. Which effectively gives her a 10 percent stake in the company. The first gigawatt is scheduled to be deployed in the second half of next year.
It’s one of many big bets AMD is making on AI data centers to power AI. What Su said she’s not worried about is competition from Nvidia, or even Google or Amazon, both of which have their own plans to make chips. “When I look at the landscape, what keeps me up at night is: How do we move faster when it comes to innovation?” Su said.
Su believes that AI is still in its infancy and that her company needs to be prepared to provide chips for the future. “As good as today’s models are, the next one will be even better,” she says. There is huge potential in artificial intelligence, and “there’s no reason not to continue to push this technology” into the future.