How to Build a Thriving AI Ecosystem with Lisa Su, CEO of AMD
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Artificial intelligence is just the latest in the wave technologies to increase the demand of high performance ships, but it's not the only. The last decade was filled with the preferable of cloud, gaming, social networks, I O T devices and more, which LED to some pretty incredible gross stories.

Many are familiar with videos as its guy rocket to the top market cap stock in the world earlier this year, and as of this recording, sitting at over three trillion dollars. But let's not forget others, some conductor companies like M C S, M, L or 8 cup， each ly growing by an order magnus de over the last decade. But today you'll get to hear about a fifty x craft story over the same time period from lisa sue, incredible woman who's been at the helm of AMD throughout that run.

For now, i'll pass IT over to a extensive growth general partner sewing to properly introduce a episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any asy fund. Please note that a six sense e and euphoria az may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to orm investments, please see a sixteen sitcom slack disclosures.

Hey, guys, i'm sewing general partner on the a sixteen z growth team. Welcome back to our AI revolution series, where we talk to industry leaders about how the harnessing power of generated A I and steering their companies through the next platform shift. We have a very special guess this episode, lisa sue chair and CEO of AMD.

Lisa is one of the most impressive CEO in history, and SHE took over the helm of AMD. The value of the company has grown over fifty times to a market cap of two hundred fifty billion as of the recording this podcast. Even more importantly, lisa and AMD are democratizing the benefits of gena.

I thanks not only to AMD top notch chip design, but also throw an open ecosystem that allows developers to build A I tools across a huge range of use cases. It's no surprise that lisa at the helm of this effort. She's been an innovator in high performance compute across her entire career, starting from texas instruments to IBM and free scale before joining AMD.

This pod is an especially exciting one because lisa is joined by none other than sixteen z Operating partner. Bob swan was most recently the C E O of intel, one of AMD fierce rivals. It's a huge treat to sit on bobin lisa talking shop and reminisce about their time together in the industry. And this wide ranging conversation, this and bob covered the state of the art and AI compute, the chip supplied chain, the role of ecosystem partnerships and where lisa thinks AI is evolving from. Here, let's get started.

It's great to heavy here, and thanks again for spending some time with us.

Thank you so much, bob. It's great to be here with you too.

Let's jump in on the inquisition. Alright, so twelve years. A A M D, ten, as the C E O, tell us a little bit about your career journey and how you got to A M D, if you will.

A group of engineer, engineer at heart, went to a school in semiconductor devices and really did the majority of my early career at I B M. Doing R N D around around devices. And then as you think about sort of fun things to do in the world, I was always fascinated with the idea that the work that you do in chips is such that you can influence really the way so many things like technology is so important. And so I just loved being at the forefront of high performance computing and computing all these years.

And that brought me to free scale semiconductor for five years, where I O for a while years ago, like I used, say, when I would tell people, what do you do? Well, I build semiconductor chips. And people are like, well, what's that like? Why I should I care about that? Is that important? And now everybody knows what semiconductors are and why they're so important and why they they power everything in our lives. And so that's what's fun about the industry that we're in and the fact that you're able to do things that, that actually matter in the world.

If you think about when you first started the role of compute in the grand scheme that thinks related today was route to be narrow.

that's exactly right, bob. I think when you think about even the idea of pcs and people using personal computers and everyone needing a computer, and then everyone needing sort of a smart phone, then everyone needing big cloud data centres and now everyone needing A I I do think IT has been an evolution of how semicon conductors and sort of the power of chips have really infiltrated every aspect of the business world, our personal lives. And for the good, right, we're all much Better because we have all this technology and .

it's almost like, what would we possibly do if we didn't have all this technology behind our desk, in our hand, in our car, wherever computers happening, everywhere, through all shorts of devices. And then along comes this thing called A I. And it's like compute.

It's everywhere. Can you just talk about how you see AI its relative importance? And then over the longer term horizon, where's this gonna take us and where are you an AMD gonna take us?

yeah. I think as you think about all of the various large technology discontinuity that we've seen over the last thirty years, they've all been a super important. They started small and they are really influence every way we experience technology.

Yet I think A I is probably the most important one, i'd like to say, over the last thirty years, forty years, fifty years, because it's something more than just technology. I think IT really is, you know, A I becomes the ability for us all to become smarter, more productive, really utilize the incredible data that's out there to help us move for. And so I really see A I were just at the very beginning of the A I mark, and it's an opportunity for us to take technology to yet a different level.

And for us and AMD, my belief is A I is gonna be everywhere and every product that we build. But importantly, it's at the foundation of what enables all of these great applications. And so yes, we're all building A I compute these days. We're trying to build IT as fast as possible so that we can have all of those smart developers really take advantage of the technology.

And as you said, it's faster ating because in some ways, A I has been around for such a long period time. And while new technologies and innovations have a tendency to start slow, this one has moved pretty fast. You're right, IT was .

always around and IT was always something that we thought had a lot of potential. But Frankly, A I before general, A I was somewhat hard to use, and so IT took experts to really unlock the technology. I think the ChatGPT moment, as we all remember IT, was the moment that A R became easy.

We could all talk to our computers and asked questions. And yes, in is nowhere near is perfect. I mean, we have so much work to do, we're still very early. But the fact that we can make technology now so accessible, I think, is what makes this generated A I arc so interesting and and what's accelerated the adoption.

But for A M D, you've always been a high performance compute company. Is you think about the intersection of the company, what is meant for the industry and then the overlay of AIGC, any commonalities with the internet mobility, just the commonalities that positions you so well to capture this opportunity?

yeah. Well, if I just go back a little bit, when I first took over a CEO of A M D S, like ten years ago now, IT was really in moment where we were like, what should we be when we grow up? And if you remember back in those days is like two thousand and fourteen, the whole craze was around mobile phones or tablets.

I, like everybody, was into that kind thing. And my board even asked me what lisa S. A M D.

Can not the tablets, right? And I said, well, i'm actually not sure that our specialty, our specialty is around hyperfine computing. We build big things.

As one says, everyone has to know what they're best at, and that's what we're best at. We're best at building large complex microprocessors or GPU or with our opposition of silence ings, adaptive and embedded computing. And when you look going forward, you see that high performance computing is really important in the industry in so many places.

And IT is at the heart of what makes A I possible. Because if you think about what makes A I possible, it's the ability to train these models with hundreds of billions of premature trillion preedy so that they become ultra smart. And then we can ask you all these questions.

And IT gets most of them right. You need hy performance computer at the heart of that. So IT is a great feeling to be good, is a great to be a place where you know that the technology, that your building can really push the envelope on, what can be done in .

the industry. And do you see the overtime will IT always be the highest performance chip that is gonna be the different parentis? Or or is he going to evolve for the different workloads and the different multimodal ties? And yeah.

it's a great point in a great question. I am actually a believer and you need the right compute form factor for each application. So right now, there's a lot of energy around building the largest language models and really this large G, P. Use that are being used for training and inference.

But I do see if you look whether you're at the edge with embedded applications, industrial applications or our motive applications, medical applications or you're even at the client level in your PC or your phone, you're going to need different types of A I. And so you'll have different engines for that. And that's good. I mean, that's what spurs all of the innovation that's happening around the industry.

The other thing that i've found may be most fascinating about the summit conductor industry is the ecosystem and the importance of the different players. As you think about development of product, how do you deal with both what you need to do, but also the inter dependencies with the ecosystem? Delivering something requires a bunch of different players. How do you think about that in the context of product development? But to get products to market.

well, I don't think there's any one company that can do IT all. I mean, at the end of the day, we all have specialties and their things that were good at, but the opportunity to closely collaborate and partner is so important, where big believer in open ecosystems and industry standards and the idea that, hey, i'm building these great processors, they should connect to other people's networking and we should build to interOperate together.

The software ecosystem is super important to developers shouldn't have to develop for one companee hardware. Developers should be able to develop what they need and be able to use what's the best hardware underneath. So I think that's part of the evolution of an open ecosystem so that we can get the best innovation .

on out there in this constant evolution. We've seen this debate over time, close garden interOperable, what is going to be the foments winner if there is such a thing in an A I world on open interpreter able technologies and interfaces?

I'm a big believer in open ecosystems. Interrogation is really important. Close walls usually end up being a problem if you look at sort of technology arts of time. And in this world where technology is moving so fast and whether it's a new model or a new hardware technology or new capability, you want to make sure that is .

interpreted along the same lines. You and other players in the industry recently announced the new ultra accelerator link and the ethernet link standards. Is that an example of how you think about opening how you engage with the ecosystem?

Yeah, I think it's a great example we're all looking at when you think about these large AI clusters that you need in the future. Networking is such an important piece of IT, but you do what this choice as to what hardware you connecting, what's the processor, what's the networking fabric, what's the overall system market texture.

So the ult accelerator link and ultra either net consorting are great examples where competitors and peers can come together and say, you know what, we're going to adopt open standards and were each gonna innovate on top of that. And those are two great examples and and includes many companies that do compete but also can CoOperate. And if you think about that, that's exactly what an open ecosystem is supposed to be.

And you talk about competitors, industry players coming together. The demand for compute over the last several years has been maybe unprecedented just in terms of its pace and its distribution and the ability to ramp up supply to meet these incredible demands when you throw in cycle times to put more capacity in covered supply chain. Disruptions for these disruptions are chAllenges on the supply side had they impeded your ability to move faster in some areas. And what did you learn from this that will make the next supply constraint be a bit smoother for the industry?

There are when you look over the last four, five years, probably the largest disruption to the semon ductor supply chain was really around copy IT was the moment where everyone needed more summer conductors at the same time, which kind of wasn't expected. Usually what happens in the semon ductor market is you'll have one market up, but one market down. Mobile may be really hot, but infrastructure will be down or vice versa.

What we sign code was basically every market at the same time had this concentrated effect. And the sea conductor supply chain is actually really good at meeting demand. Actually, we usually overshoot, as you know, bob, that happens from time to time, but that takes time, right? IT takes eighteen months, twenty four months to really put that all on board.

And so I think the industry as a whole has done a good job at bringing more supply on board. The more recent thing as IT relates to A I, where it's super hard to get G P S, that truly is, again, nobody forecasts what general A I would need. And so IT has taken some time to really build all this advanced packaging capacity and have been with memory capacity. But again, the semiconductor supply is good at that. And we just have to get a little bit Better at forecasting what long term demands are.

I do remember exciting two thousand and fifty and entry in two thousand and twenty, where that Normal cyclical nature, the industry, I think we are all looking at expecting two thousand and twenty to come down and then cover hand for a short period of time. IT looked like things we're going on further south. And all the sudden, to your point, everybody needed supply in in many ways, while there is issues materializing the way the ecosystem comes together in the sea conductor industry and the sophistication of the supply chain despite the chAllenges is pretty impressive.

That's exactly right. I think we've all ten gotten smart red and Better as a result. I think this idea of, hey, let's try to just eat out every last penny in the supply chain is gone a little bit ways to let's build resilience into the spy train. When governments are asking, do you have enough semi conductors? I think that gives us permission to really think more broadly about resiliency.

And we'll talk about resiliency and government asking. I think IT was roughly two years ago to the day there was a thing called the chips act and fa audience, the government signs into the law a bill authorizing two hundred eighty billion dollars to help in the design and the manufacture turing in the us. Of semon ductor. And then fifty three billion of that was authorized to be spent. I know it's still working process, but as you think about the chips act and some of the chAllenges from the last couple years, how do you see that helping resiliency of supply chain going forward?

I had to say i'm a big supporter of the trips act. I never would have thought that five years ago, semiconductors would be high enough priority in the U. S.

Government's view of what needed clear industrial policy. Some people say, hey, it's not enough or does make a difference. I think it's made a huge difference.

It's made a huge difference because what is really done is it's put at the top of the priority list, resiliency and some conductor, both manufacturing as well as research development in the united states. And of course, there's much, much more work to do, as you said, IT, to work in progress. But it's a good thing.

It's a good thing for the industry that there's a focus here. I'm actually particularly excited about some of the work that's being done on the R N D side because I think there's a whole opportunity to really train the next generation of leaders who will lead the semiconductor, sort of researching development as well as future capabilities. So yeah, I think it's a great thing.

And yes, it's still early days. And we need to make sure that every dollar spent is spent for good reasons and that we get the return on investment on the other side. But it's a clear indication of how important semiconductors are to the U. S. And really to the global economy.

And I couldn't agree more the dynamics of we've talked about the ecosystem working together and the importance of the ecosystem to throw the government in their obviously across chAllenges, but industry and government working together, red as self. Big problems, I think, is a real necessity in some areas. And this is the one where i'm filled about the chip sac itself.

But the deployment and the proof points, I think they're still in front of us. So it'll be an exciting time, and I hope that the chAllenges around resiliency will be remembered, remembered or real. View meer, yes. Yeah, exactly. We remembers this, the best way to frame IT at a time when innovation is happy all the time you d still, Larry, relatively long cycle development time .

for a how .

do you guys deal with long cycle development with, uh, short cycle innovation and what inherent chAllenges or opportunities that crazy for you in the industry?

Yeah I think the most important saying in our world, especially in hardware, is one needs to try to have a Crystal ball. You're never gna predict the future entirely, but you do need to be able to say, hey, these are the disruptions that are coming up, right? These are the things that we need to pay attention to. Probably the best example that I can think of, and this is one where we had a lot of debate internally, is what's the future of morals law that's been debated.

Just I remember I remember those debate.

And finally, I A believer in more law, has been extended so many times because people are super smart and able to come up with different ways of extending the same principle of more transit stars, more capability every couple of years. But for example, IT bets like a that's packaging. And when do you go to two and a half day and three d packaging? And for us, we use this technology called trip lets. We didn't know.

We didn't know at the time when we were making that decision was I going to be the right bet? But we knew that we had to make that bet. And you really don't figure that out until three to five years out.

So you're question about how do you know? You don't know, but you try to make sure that you're bedding in the right direction and then you have to be usual enough to adjust accordingly. And that's what this whole world of sort of high performance .

computing is about. You talked about the right bats, and you guys have had incredible success on making the right bets. What is the bounce between how you learn from your customers about the right bets to make, but also how you lead your customers given the development cycles? How do you strike that baLance? And A M, D.

you, top two priorities that I tell the company all the time， and the first one is your tech company. Our job is every day to wake up and build great products, but we do that through having very deep customer relationships because I really do believe that they go hand in hand.

Our customers are some of the largest, whether cloud manufacturer or OEM or enterprises in the world, that they see the problems that they're trying to solve, and that's what the most beneficial is talking to our customers about. Hey, what problems are you having? What are you trying to solve two, three, four years out? And then our technologies can really come up with ideas for how to solve this problem. So it's not like it's one for one where we listen to everything people say, but we do listen a lot because that tells us that we are working on the right things because whatever we do, you want to ensure that the technology your building is something that will solve .

somebody's problem. Hyper scale market, tremendous progress over the last several years. congrats. Correlation learnings from winning and hyper scale with this rapid growth from my eyes as a learning that you've been able to extract from what IT takes to win in one and then how you to translate to win A I.

So when we started in the hyper scale market with our first generation products are then product portfolio, think we are about maybe one percent share of the supermarket.

And actually, the whole idea of having deep partnerships with customers is really we needed to be able to say that, hey, it's all about robot, right? Yes, it's great the product you have today, but it's all about can you keep a sustained level of constant innovation many generations out. And I think we have made a lot of progress in hyper schaller.

I love the relationships that we have across the top brands, whether the microsoft, amazon or google or oracle, le or meta. It's always about how do we innovate together. I think the A I R is very similar in the sense that these are big bets that the hyper schell's are making on who their technology partners are gonna be. And we want to help them accomplish that. So that is about putting up great technology but also being very consistent in execution and offering a long term mode up.

The progress you've made on that less than one percent market chair present is unable able I remember those left in one percent days, not fondly. I it's a tough market .

yeah tough market as we know, but we must earn IT every day. So i'm very congressman of that.

That's what keeps you ahead of the game and progressing forward so many years ago before your arrival, you are not a fabula company, but post to spin out of what's now global founders ies. You are dependent on the ecosystem, the manufacturing ecosia. Can you talk a little bit about the chAllenge is not only integrating tightly with your customers and hyper scales, but also the need to integrate tightly with the fb players as well?

Yeah, absolutely. So IT was the right answer at the time for M. D. IT was before my time. But to separate the manufacturing Operations from the design Operation, we just didn't have the volume, the capex, the business model to make that work.

Now what IT is today is we get to focus on what we're good at, which is design, and that is what we are focused on. However, we do have to be very tightly partnered with our manufacturing partners. T, S, M, C is our main manufacturing partner for advanced technologies.

We're plotting out far beyond the next few years. Were really looking into the five plus year time frame of what we need to do. And IT is something that you learn.

You learn how to partner well and you learn how to really get advice on these other areas like worth technology going and how do we optimize our designs. But yes, I think that's part of the ecosystem now. And it's even more complicated because it's not just about silicon, it's about packaging. And really, how do we put these trips together for very complex multimedia ltd chip type things?

And recently, I mean, you talk about the integration and how it's not just about chips anymore, but ma has been a really important part of your strategic agenda many ways, and you've done some incredible acquisitions at incredible times. Zt systems. Maybe just talk a little bit about how important nama has been for you and then illuminate a little about how you see the role zt systems supply in the evolution of solving customers problems.

Yeah, absolutely. We've used dominate to really round out our portfolio. So if you look at.

Over the last five or six years, we probably acquired about six companies are so some small, some larger. Know yilin was the largest semiconductor acquisition. I think it's still the largest semiconductor acquisition.

And that was bringing in you know the F, P J and adoptive computing portfolio into A M D, which really brought in our portfolio. We announced to the opposition of E T systems. And we're talking a little bit about A I and how fast A I is moving.

What we've seen certainly going forward is it's not just about the silicon, and silicon is important, and we're pushing every out of getting more computing technology on the silicon in the package. The software is incredibly important. So being able to get just enough A I software people so that we can help our customers and partners utilize our technology.

But we're also finding that the integration of hardware, software and then really systems is critical because now you're building these very large clusters of high performance computing, CPU and G, P U and everything from how do you connect them from a networking standpoint, a thermal standpoint to just a reliability standpoint is so important to actually make IT productive. That's what Z T system is. So it's the third leg of our store, if you think hardwork software now solutions. So you are very excited about IT is really an expansion of the problem that we've been solving around how do we enable our customers with the best hype performance compute. And that now extends into the .

system as a student of what's going on in the industry and you guys in particular, whether its organic development or ei partnerships, each step you make always seems to be scared to where the puck is going as a post and necessary is so a lot of the audience is in roy stage starting plan. Can you talk a little bit about how you see the role of startups and in semiconductor broadly but more A I specifically is a CEO of a large company. How you see the role of startups in the industry?

There are so many good ideas out there. And the beauty of the startup is you can get a good idea, and now you get some backing from great under capitals like yourself, and you can really innovate an experiment and learn on those ideas so fast. And that's really, really valuable. I'm really enjoying the work that then we're doing, what startups we've decided to become much more active and how we're working on this one is we want to help many of these companies. So by the way, if anybody needs GPU.

we'd love to work with you. Did everybody catch that? Everybody need GPU small leverage. Yeah, yeah.

I got IT. It's okay. But I think the role of startups, especially right now, has never been stronger.

Cutting a innovation experiment, really what i've seen and maybe you've seen that as well, bob, is I think even large enterprises who typically used to be let's all that much more conservative and working with startups are also becoming much more open because again, this is back to the disruption I talked about. Nobody wants to be behind in A I. And so they want and need people with good ideas to help them implement in this complex world. And if it's a start up, that's great. And we've learned the time from startups actually and the rate and pace and speed at which people are moving is fantastic.

I mean, some ways, given the evolution of the ecosystem, the barriers to enter semi over time have been relatively large. Because you have to find who's gonna a make my product for me and the couple you raise. If IT has to go to build your own server farm or your own fab, the lack of innovation takes place in start a peco system.

But with the hyperscore in a world day, poy to make getting started much simple with the world class boundary capabilities that exists. And we love interacting with you and being a part of that. I can't thank you enough for doing this, to spend such a treat, to chat with you.

And congratulations on what you guys are doing at A M. D. I admire your leadership in the role you've played in the industry. Thanks so much. Spending time with us.

Thank you so much for of it's a real pleasure and really appreciate all .

the collaboration.