Chair, President & Chief Executive Officer, Advanced Micro Devices
Lisa Su explains what's coming next in AI
Wall Street keeps asking if the AI boom is slowing down. AMD CEO Lisa Su says she's seeing the exact opposite.
In this interview with Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Briqan Sozzi, Dr. Lisa Su explains why AI infrastructure demand continues to accelerate, how AI agents are changing the economics of computing, why inference has become the industry's biggest growth driver, and why AMD believes the AI opportunity is still in its early stages.
Timestamps
00:00 AMD's AI announcements
01:15 Why inference is overtaking training
02:25 What's surprising about AI adoption
03:56 AI agents change everythi...
About Lisa Su
Lisa Su, chair and CEO of AMD, spoke at the company's Advancing AI 2026 conference in San Francisco on July 22-23, 2026, where she announced new products and partnerships. Su stated that AI infrastructure demand is accelerating, not slowing, and described inference as the industry's largest growth driver. She said AMD expects the AI accelerator market to reach approximately $1.4 trillion by 2030, approaching the size of the entire semiconductor market today. Su also announced a $5 billion investment in Anthropic and discussed the Helios rack-scale architecture, which she said offers 10 to 15% more performance and up to 30% better tokens-per-dollar for customers compared to competitors. She reiterated her view that no single chip company will dominate the AI market, arguing that the world is heterogeneous and requires an ecosystem of different compute engines. In a commencement address at MIT on May 28, 2026, Su told graduates that "we may discover more in the next 10 years than we have in the last 30," but emphasized that "technology itself does not decide what the future looks like. The best people do." She advised graduates to "run towards the hardest problems" and said that "luck is not just being in the right place at the right time. It is taking the risk to work on something really hard." Su reflected on her decision to become CEO of AMD 12 years ago, describing it as her dream job, and noted that the company made a long-term bet that high-performance computing would be the most important technology of the future.
Transcript (24 segments)
B
Brian0:00
It has been a huge week for Nvidia rival AMD at its advancing AI conference in San Francisco. The unveiling of new chips, a new $5 billion investment in Anthropic, and a reiteration that demand for AI remains incredibly strong. I sat down for a conversation with AMD chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. Su has been the driving force behind AMD's ascent the past decade.
L
Lisa Su0:22
First of all, for the industry, we're calling the industry market growth to be a $2 trillion market opportunity for us as we think about from now through 2030. So it's just an incredibly large market. We're seeing this point in AI, we've called the fact that AI is at an inflection point where more and more people are doing useful work, doing meaningful work, and that has made inference the largest growth driver overall. And I am super excited to say that we are in full production for Helios, our MI455 rack scale architecture, our new Venice CPUs, and a tremendous amount of new content. So it's a pretty exciting time for us. I think it's an exciting time for industry, and more importantly for all of us in the AI ecosystem. This is the time to really accelerate what we can bring to the market.
B
Brian1:15
Amongst all the important points you made at the event, Lisa, this one also stood out to me. AI is evolving. You talked about just now too. AI is evolving from training to what does that mean for the AI revolution and what does it mean for a company like AMD?
L
Lisa Su1:30
Well, what it really means, Brian, is all of us are now starting to experience the real power of AI. We have great customers that are training and doing foundational models. But the key is the model is only as good as the output that you get from it. And so with inference, that is all of us asking questions. That's agents working. And that is growing at a really accelerated rate and pace. And that's why we're saying that just the accelerator market alone is going to reach $1.4 trillion by the time we get to 2030. And inference is really the way we turn AI from a technology to something that really changes the way we do business, the way we do research, the way we do healthcare, all of those aspects of it. So I'm really excited to see the rate and pace of adoption of AI.
B
Brian2:26
I think I've told you this before, but it bears repeating. I live vicariously through your X feed. I see you traveling the country. I've seen you at the White House before. Lots of cool things you've been doing this year as you've traveled the world and you've done your important work at AMD. What has surprised you about this AI movement?
L
Lisa Su2:43
I think what has surprised me, Brian, in a very positive way is the rate and pace of adoption is actually faster than any of us thought. Frankly, we usually think about what's going to happen in a market, we think about updating it on an annual basis. And with AI and with everything that we've seen around the world with our customers, things are changing on a monthly and a quarterly basis. So just over the last five or six months, agents have become really productive. The idea that you're not just asking an AI model a question, you're actually asking an AI model to help you solve a problem, help you code a new software module, or help you plan your next trip. Those are things that just a year ago we wouldn't have thought were possible, and all of that requires more and more compute infrastructure. So that is probably the most interesting, exciting, surprising thing: for those of us in the industry, I've never seen a technology adoption curve like what we're seeing with AI right now, and agents are just taking it to a whole new level.
B
Brian3:56
You really increased your total addressable market, or TAM, for your data center business, your accelerator market, pretty significantly as you look out to 2030. On the topic of AI agents in 2030, what are these agents doing that they aren't doing today?
L
Lisa Su4:14
Well, let me start with the very important thing to remember about AI: AI is a tool. So AI is a tool to make every one of us more productive, to make every one of our companies more productive. And so the idea of agents is think about the productivity you can get from 10 employees. You have really smart people, but if each of those 10 employees had 10 agents or a hundred agents or even a thousand agents, they can be much more productive. And so the whole idea of Agentic AI is to create a closed loop situation where you can ask your AI to help you solve more complicated problems so that you as an employee can be much more efficient. At the end, the human is the one that decides the right or wrong answer, but AI can help you look at a whole set of options much faster and more efficiently than if you had to do it by hand. That's the power of Agentic AI.
B
Brian5:17
Within the technology that you unveiled this event, Helios for example, you just mentioned it. What does something like that do that prior iterations of your products don't do?
L
Lisa Su5:27
One of the most important things when we think about AI is just how many questions can you answer and how much does it cost. So you hear things like AI tokens or how many AI tokens can you get per dollar. What Helios does is it's an incredible feat of engineering that allows you to scale much broader in terms of the size of the models, the types of questions, the number of users that can use a certain system. The way to think about it is we're seeing more than a 30 times improvement in performance when we look at the new Helios systems. From a customer standpoint, that just means you can get a lot more done for your money. And the way I think about it is it's a very positive feedback loop: the more AI can do, the more compute you need; the more compute you have, the more intelligence you have; the more problems you can solve. And all of that relates to the importance and the essential foundation is the computing layer, which is what we do at AMD.
B
Brian6:33
You've mentioned this to me in the past, Lisa, but you brought it up again in your keynote. It's one of your philosophies or one of your beliefs that one chip player will not win it all during this AI revolution. Why is that still the case?
L
Lisa Su6:48
Well, I think the most important thing to think about, Brian, is the world is a very heterogeneous place. We're all different. Our companies are different. Our problem sets are different. What we're trying to solve is different. As a result, there's not just one chip that can do it all or one company that can do it all. What you really need is an ecosystem. You need an end-to-end set of engines. That's what I like to say at AMD. We have an end-to-end set of compute engines from CPUs to GPUs to FPGAs to A6, the ability to put all that together. And we have a true belief in an open ecosystem. The idea is the more developers we have on AMD, the faster we can move the ecosystem, the more progress we can make. That's just good for the overall industry. So I'm a big believer in there's no one-size-fits-all, but there's incredible power in bringing the ecosystem together and allowing us to innovate simultaneously.
B
Brian7:50
You mentioned too as well that, quote, customer demand for these new technologies is extremely strong. And I look at from a stock market perspective, we just saw folks react to higher capex estimates from a Tesla and an Alphabet. What are our investors missing? Because I talked to you and others in the chip space, they all tell me demand is strong. So why are we so concerned about hyperscalers raising their capex?
L
Lisa Su8:16
I have a true belief on this. We have to look at the long arc. The long arc of technology is I am absolutely convinced of the power of compute. And when I say AI compute equates to intelligence, why wouldn't you want more intelligence? Of course you want more intelligence. The important thing is where is the return on investment for those investments. We are seeing the return on investment. We are ramping our own AI usage within AMD very significantly, month over month, and we're seeing the productivity come back in better products, more capable products, faster time to market. That will come out as you look at the long arc. Whether you see that on a quarter by quarter basis is for others to think about, but from my standpoint, the long arc is absolutely clear that compute demand is at a premium today. It is one of the places where you can't just wake up tomorrow and say you want more compute. You have to make those investments 12, 18, 24 months in advance. You have to plan the entire supply chain and the entire ecosystem. So we are very confident in the demand picture, and we are ensuring that we have all the pieces to satisfy a larger and larger piece of the overall market.
B
Brian9:45
This is really important stuff you just brought up. So you're not seeing any leveling out? You're not seeing anything slow down?
L
Lisa Su9:52
We are not seeing that at all, Brian. Every conversation I have with every large customer is how can we go faster. I think it's a fundamental belief. We believe in the tech, and it will return on investment, and it's going to be a very positive cycle.
B
Brian10:08
So you also this week, getting lost in the sauce a little bit, is this new deal with Anthropic. You're investing $5 billion into this company. Now you had, you gave warrants to Tesla, you gave warrants to OpenAI. Why the change here with Anthropic? Why invest $5 billion in them?
L
Lisa Su10:25
Well, first of all, Brian, I have to say I'm thrilled with our new partnership with Anthropic. There's no question that they are one of the leaders in frontier AI models, and being able to work hand-in-hand with their engineers is really a wonderful thing. The fact is, MI415 Helios is a fantastic product. We're excited to be ramping with them at scale up to 2 gigawatts. Every relationship is different, right? We believe in Anthropic. We are very happy to be making a strategic investment of up to $5 billion as we work together. This is one of the things about the AI ecosystem: we are all in this together. So it's hardware, software, models, bringing it together in data centers, ensuring that we are really tracking those things together. That's exactly what we're doing with Anthropic. It's aligning our strategic interests with their interests. And to your broader question, we're thrilled with our overall partnerships across the board. When you look at OpenAI, when you look at Meta, these are the top AI companies in the world that are choosing AMD, yes because of the technology but also because they believe in our long-term roadmap and the ability to collaborate and work together to solve the biggest problems in AI compute going forward.
B
Brian11:50
Is there any concern that everyone in tech is so intertwined?
L
Lisa Su11:57
I think it's always been like that. I think it's an ecosystem where we're working on this together. In some sense, we are probably more aligned than we've ever been, which is actually a really good thing. When I say aligned, it's because these are such large investments over time. The more we know about what our customers need, the better prepared we can be for that moment. So the AI world is such that you need every part of the ecosystem to come together. The fact that the ecosystem is intertwined is the way it should be, and it's actually going to make us more efficient long term.
B
Brian12:42
Lisa, lastly, you said something on your X account, I think it was July 4th, that really resonated with me and I think ties into everything you announced here at this event. You mentioned that your parents came to this country as students. I've seen you over the course of your career. I remember when you got this job. I remember when you acquired Xilinx. I remember when you did the Meta deal, the OpenAI deal, now Anthropic. Now this moment with Helios. These are very big moments for any company. Big moments in the tech industry. Do you reflect on how far you've come?
L
Lisa Su13:11
Brian, I can say that I view this as the most exciting time of my entire career, and I'm extremely thankful to be in this place. I view it as a true privilege and honor. I love the fact that we can contribute and make a difference. I love the fact that the technology we're working on is impacting billions of people every day. I couldn't ask for a better place to be.
B
Brian13:39
Well, keep rocking there, Lisa. It's always great to get some time with you. Enjoy the rest of that event. I'm sure you're busy. You're the star of the hour. I'll talk to you soon.
L
Lisa Su13:48
Thank you so much, Brian. Take care.