Do we like them?

Do we like Lisa Su?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful in her own words and a real record of backing women in engineering, but the record on LGBTQ+ issues is thin.

Su was born in Taiwan and moved to New York with her parents at two, when her father came to the US for graduate school. She says her parents pushed her to be ambitious, and she has traced her love of engineering to a childhood of tinkering. She went on to take all three of her degrees at MIT.

The career arc is the story. A short stint at Texas Instruments, about 13 years at IBM, then chief technology officer at Freescale, before she joined AMD in 2012 and became CEO in 2014. She has led the turnaround that made AMD a serious rival to the biggest names in chips.

On the harm test, there is nothing nasty to report. No campaigning against anyone's rights, no conspiracy-theory slide and no culture-war grifting turned up in the reporting I read. The closest thing to a political stoush is her view that China is a “large opportunity” and that export controls need balance with wide adoption of US tech. Where you land on that depends on whether you read it as sensible business or as putting profit first.

The honest gap: I found nothing from her either way on LGBTQ+ issues, so this is a pass on what's on the record, not a rainbow-flag endorsement. Her public focus has been women in technology and engineering talent, and AMD has run programs for women in tech.

The recent news is a money story. AMD reported record revenue this week, and earlier this year Meta agreed to buy six gigawatts of AMD computing power in a deal valued at more than $100 billion. Meta could end up owning as much as 10% of AMD. Su said she wants AMD to be a “clear seat at the table” for Meta.

The good stuff is real. Her gift led MIT to name its nanotech building after her, making her the first alumna to fund a building that carries her own name. In 2018 she set up a fellowship fund for female graduate students in nanotechnology. She said “MIT has played an incredibly important role in my life.”