Lisa Su has picked up Yahoo Finance’s 2026 CEO of the Year title, and the stock market numbers tell you why. Shares of Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) have jumped 158% this year, while i
Lisa Su has picked up Yahoo Finance’s 2026 CEO of the Year title, and the stock market numbers tell you why.
Shares of Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) have jumped 158% this year, while its much bigger AI rival Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has gone the other way, falling 7%.
Yahoo Finance made the award after AMD landed major customers, delivered stronger earnings than Wall Street expected and pushed further into the market for AI computing equipment.
The comparison gets even sharper beyond Nvidia. Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) is down just under 1% this year, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite have risen 11% and 10%, respectively.
AMD hasn’t escaped the selling that hit technology shares after the midterm elections, though. Its valuation broke through $1 trillion for the first time in late September, then retreated to around $906 billion.
There was nothing inevitable about AMD getting here. When Lisa joined the company as a senior executive in 2012, its financial situation was shaky enough to raise questions about its future.
She took over as CEO in 2014. The business she runs today has a different set of problems: securing enough AI orders, building systems customers can deploy at scale, and keeping up with enormous spending across the industry.
At Yahoo Finance Invest, Lisa said she came aboard because she wanted to help build technology that mattered well beyond the chip industry. “The reason I joined AMD was I wanted to be part of a company that really could be at the bleeding edge of technology,” she said. She added that computing could have a meaningful effect on both the economy and everyday life.
Some of AMD’s biggest changes came through acquisitions. Its purchase of Xilinx broadened the types of chips it could sell. This year brought a far less conventional deal: $8.2 billion for World Labs, a company working on AI that can understand and generate three-dimensional spaces.
World Labs was founded in 2024 by Fei-Fei Li, the researcher often called the Godmother of AI and a former chief scientist at Google Cloud, part of Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG). She is set to become AMD’s executive vice president and chief scientist, answering directly to Lisa.
And, AMD also has a deal with Meta (NASDAQ: META) that could potentially see the Facebook parent owning up to 10% of the chipmaker. Moreover, Lisa got the National Medal of Science from President Donald Trump and participated in many international events.
AMD’s third-quarter results show the highest sales ever at $13.38 billion, an increase of 45 percent compared to a year ago and higher than the expected $13.06 billion. Adjusted earnings amounted to $2.09 per share, which represents an increase of 74 percent, beating expectations of $1.94.
Its data center business contributed $8.5 billion, an increase of 97%. Demand for EPYC server processors helped, alongside the expanding rollout of Instinct MI450 AI accelerators. AMD expects data center sales to rise another 50% quarter over quarter in the final three months of 2026.
Lisa has also laid out ambitious goals for 2027, which include revenue growth beyond 80% and doubling of revenues from servers and revenues from data center AI products.
This is powered by the use of MI450 GPUs and the 6th generation EPYC Venice CPUs.
Both of these go to power Helios, a rack-scale AI system built by AMD that combines processors, networking hardware, and software to enable customers to both train and execute on their models. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) started integrating Helios within its Azure AI services starting the second half of 2026.
And then there is Anthropic. The AI company aims to purchase up to two gigawatts of MI450 GPUs through the Helios platform from the beginning of 2027, a deal that could be worth tens of billions of dollars to AMD. In addition, AMD and Anthropic have separately entered into an agreement where AMD will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic.
Lisa says to Yahoo Finance that computing power is going to become increasingly important for business productivity.
“Over the horizon, I see AI and superintelligence becoming more and more essential to every aspect of our lives and every aspect of our business,” she said, pointing to why companies across the sector are spending so heavily.
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