While AMD’s interests were represented at the UBS technology conference by Executive Vice President Forrest Norrod, the company’s CEO Lisa Su gave an interview to Bloomberg, in which she spoke about the important role of artificial intelligence in the development of not only AMD, but also the industry in in general.
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«I truly believe that AI is the most transformative technology I have seen in my career. It is developing faster than anything we have seen before. It feels like we’ve made more progress in the last 18 months than in more than a decade,” Lisa Su said in an interview with Bloomberg in Austin, Texas.
Lisa Su, as you know, began her career at IBM and Texas Instruments, having previously received an engineering education in the USA, where she moved with her parents from Taiwan in early childhood. Having received the opportunity to lead AMD in 2014, during her years at the helm of the company she turned it from a catching up player into a market leader. Now AMD faces a new challenge: trying to undermine Nvidia’s position in the artificial intelligence accelerator segment. It has already managed to beat Intel in many respects, although the former’s products still dominate the market for x86-compatible processors. However, in the server segment, AMD products already occupy about a third. AMD representatives do not undertake to estimate their share of the market for accelerators for AI systems, but this year the company expects to earn about $5 billion from their sales.
By the way, speaking at the UBS technology conference, AMD Executive Vice President Forrest Norrod called 20% the generally accepted benchmark for the share of any market, which allows an abstract company to have a noticeable influence on it. At the same time, he did not make forecasts when AMD will reach such a figure in the segment of computing accelerators. In any case, Intel currently expects to earn no more than $500 million from the sale of accelerators for AI systems, and for AMD this amount will be ten times higher.
Moreover, as Bloomberg notes, AMD’s capitalization is now more than twice that of Intel, reaching $220 billion. If five years ago, AMD’s annual revenue did not exceed $5.5 billion, by the end of the current year it could increase five times compared to that level.
As representatives of Bloomberg note, Lisa Su is distinguished from her predecessors by her high degree of involvement in the most basic processes occurring in the company. She is a frequent visitor to AMD laboratories where new products are developed. This approach not only allows the head of AMD to be aware of everything that is happening, but also keeps his subordinates on their toes, who are aware of the degree of responsibility for possible mistakes. Lisa Su is credited with being intolerant of apologizing for wrongdoing and not hesitating to express her grievances. She herself pointedly explains that industry leaders allow their teams to become better than they initially expected. Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang is reportedly free to acknowledge Lisa Su’s success as a leader, noting that she empowers her company’s employees to achieve more.
Lisa Su also admires the founder of Nvidia, but for the first time publicly acknowledging the distant relationship between them, she states that she and Huang first met at an industry event, when they already held senior positions in their respective companies.
According to Lisa Su’s forecasts, the market capacity of chips for AI systems will grow by an average of 60% annually and reach $500 billion by 2028. Essentially, this will allow a single product category to achieve comparable turnover to the entire market as it currently stands. With such dynamics in the AI segment, as the head of AMD notes, there will be enough room in the market for everyone who produces “great products.” In such a situation, AMD’s limited resources will not become an obstacle to dynamic development.
As Lisa Su admits, the company has always had to make do with fewer people and resources than larger companies, but it has managed to “punch above its weight class,” as she figuratively puts it. “In our view, AI will be ubiquitous. AI will be in every application, in every product, wherever you turn, you will need computing, and we occupy the right place for this,” the head of AMD concluded.