Earlier this year, WIRED said that AMD CEO Lisa Su was “out for Nvidia’s blood.” The American chipmaker is still small compared to the juggernaut that is Nvidia—their market caps are $353 billion and $4.4 trillion, respectively—but Su’s company is gaining steam. Today, when Su took the stage at WIRED’s Big Interview conference in San Francisco, she had something else in her sights: the AI bubble.
When asked by WIRED senior writer Lauren Goode if the tech industry is in an AI bubble, her response was “emphatically, from my perspective, no.” The AI industry is going to need scores of chips from companies like AMD, and fears of such a bubble, Su said, are “somewhat overstated.”
That might sound bold, but boldness is Su’s whole deal. Since she became AMD’s CEO in 2014, she has increased the company’s market cap from $2 billion to $300 billion. Now, Su is betting big on the need for much more computing power for AI, and the data centers needed to provide that.
Still, there are plenty of hurdles ahead for AMD. One is all of those data centers being built, and another is getting its chips out into the hands of as many customers as possible. During the discussion, Goode asked the AMD CEO about selling chips to China. She confirmed that AMD will pay a 15 percent tax instituted by the Trump administration on MI308 chips it plans to resume shipping to China. The US government previously halted sales of the chips to China, but then began reviewing applications again over the summer. AMD said earlier this year that US export restrictions on the MI308 chips would cost the company roughly $800 million.
Earlier this year, AMD made a huge deal with OpenAI, under which the AI company will deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct GPUs over the course of several years. As part of the deal, AMD agreed to allow OpenAI to buy 160 million shares of the company’s stock for a penny per share. effectively giving it a 10 percent stake in the company. The first gigawatt deployment is set to rollout in the second half of next year.
It’s one of several big bets AMD is making on AI data centers to power artificial intelligence. What Su said she’s not worried about is competition from Nvidia, or even Google or Amazon, both of which have their own chip-making plans. “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 her company needs to be ready to provide chips for the future. “As good as the models are today,” she says, “the next one will be better.” There’s huge potential in AI, and “there’s not a reason not to keep pushing that technology” into the future.
