AMD CEO Su Zifeng ( Lisa Su ) delivered an impressive report card in 2026. Her career choices and efforts over the past nearly 15 years were also fully reflected in this year.
At the Yahoo Finance Investment Summit ( Yahoo Finance Invest ), Su Zifeng stated: "I joined AMD because I wanted to be part of a company that truly stands at the forefront of technology. I firmly believe that technology can have a tremendous positive impact on the economy and the world, and I hope to be a part of it."
She then continued, "If we fast-forward 10 years, I believe it's fair to say that we are driving the advancement of technological frontiers. Some of the technologies we possess are truly astonishing, and they are also contributing to some of the most important technological advancements around the world."
Over the past year, Su Zifeng's performance during her tenure at AMD has been outstanding, and this is not the first time she has achieved such results. However, 2026 is clearly different in some ways.
From achieving a transformative major transaction for AMD, to delivering results that exceeded market expectations on the financial report release date, to receiving the National Science Medal from U.S. President Donald Trump, and to participating in several high-profile international summit meetings, Su Zifeng demonstrated her most outstanding leadership skills in recent years. Her performance prior to this was already quite excellent.
AMD Investors also reaped substantial returns. Despite a significant sell-off in tech stocks after the U.S. election day, the stock price of AMD still rose by 158% throughout the year.
In contrast, competitor NVIDIA's ( NVDA ) stock price fell by 7% within the year, while Broadcom's ( AVGO ) decline was less than 1%. During the same period, the S&P 500 index rose by 11%, and the Nasdaq Composite Index rose by 10%.
Based on the above performance, Yahoo Finance awarded the highly regarded “Annual CEO” award to Su Zifeng.
Su Zifeng's Highlights in 2026
In 2012, when Su Zifeng joined AMD as a senior executive, the chip company was already on the verge of bankruptcy.
Since taking on the role of CEO in 2014, Su Zifeng has completely transformed AMD into NVIDIA's strongest competitor.
In recent years, she has driven the company to complete several major transactions, including the acquisition of Xilinx ( Xilinx ), as well as reaching a cooperation with Meta . According to the relevant arrangements, Meta may hold up to 10% of the shares in AMD in the future.
However, Su Zifeng's performance in 2026 was more like a perfect report card for a corporate executive – at least in the eyes of investors, almost everything went smoothly.
One of the notable moves is that AMD invested $8.2 billion to acquire World Labs, bringing this company, which truly possesses AI innovation capabilities, under its control. World Labs focuses on the development of software related to 3D environments.
World Labs was established in 2024 and is led by the renowned artificial intelligence researcher Fei-Fei Li ( Fei - Fei Li ). Fei-Fei Li is known in the tech community as the " AI godmother" and has previously served as the chief scientist at Google Cloud ( Google Cloud ).
After the transaction is completed, Li Feifei will join AMD as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist. She will report directly to Su Zifeng, which also highlights her key role in the future development of AMD.
AMD's market value exceeded the $1 trillion mark for the first time in late September.
Currently, the market value of AMD has fallen back to $906 billion. This reflects more of the selling pressure that swept through the market after the U.S. mid-term elections, rather than any issues with Su Zifeng's operational execution capabilities.
In fact, just a few weeks ago, AMD released its third-quarter financial report, which showed strong performance, with both revenue and adjusted earnings per share exceeding market expectations.
In the third quarter, AMD's revenue increased by 45% year-on-year, reaching a record $13.38 billion, significantly exceeding Wall Street analysts' forecast of around $13.06 billion.
After adjustment, earnings per share increased by 74% year-on-year to $2.09, easily exceeding analysts' forecast of $1.94.
The impressive performance is mainly attributed to the strong performance of the AMD data center business. Driven by the high demand for EPYC server processors and the gradual expansion of production scale of Instinct MI450 AI accelerators, the revenue from the data center business increased by 97% year-on-year, reaching a record $8.5 billion.
For the fourth quarter, AMD expects the data center business revenue to achieve a 50% quarter-on-quarter increase. Looking ahead to 2027, Suzhi Feng anticipates that the company's revenue will grow by more than 80%, with the server business revenue expected to double, and the data center AI business revenue expected to grow by more than half.
HSBC analyst John Vinh stated: "We are firmly optimistic about AMD's completely renewed product roadmap strategy, and the market's recognition of its products is also convincing. However, market expectations for AMD to increase market share and achieve growth are already quite high. We are concerned that even if actual performance is only slightly below expectations, considering that AMD's current valuation is far higher than that of its peers, it could still pose a considerable risk to its stock price."
In a year of outstanding performance, AMD also released a new generation of AI chips, with core products including the Instinct MI450 series GPU and the sixth-generation EPYC Venice CPU.
These new chips are designed to provide computational power support for the newly launched Helios rack-level AI system by AMD. This system integrates GPU, CPU, network devices, and software into a unified platform, which is used for training and running large AI models, directly challenging NVIDIA's dominant position in the AI field.
