◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek August 19, 201922
ILLUSTRATION BY TOMI UMa vice president of Intel’s Xeon server business.
When Su, an electrical engineer by training,
became the first woman to run a chip company in
2014, she was AMD’s fourth CEO in a decade. The
company had lost money in six of those 10 years,
and with glitchy chips that were weak imitations
of Intel’s, its share of the server-chip market had
gone from 26.2% to less than 1%. Today, it’s still
just 3.4% while Intel has pretty much all the rest,
according to Mercury Research, but AMD’s share
is growing, and its share price has increased more
than ninefold since Su took over, to about $32. “It’s
all about earning credibility. Every single day,” Su
says. Now that the chips have been redesigned
from the ground up, she adds, “We are structur-
ally in a better place.”
Born in Taiwan, Su graduated from the Bronx
High School of Science in New York and got her
Ph.D. from MIT. After stints at such places as Texas
Instruments Inc. and IBM Corp., she arrived at
AMD in 2012 as a senior vice president in charge
of much of the company, and helped turn things
around by getting AMD chips in Microsoft’s Xbox
One and Sony’s PlayStation 4. As CEO, she’s mostly
kept her head down and focused on customer
demands, compared with predecessors known
for splashy product launches that often couldn’t
deliver on their promises or their jabs at Intel. (The
long-standing industry joke was that AMD stands
for “Almost Made a Difference.”)
Su says she’s not involved directly in the engi-
neering of AMD’s products. Yet when AMD was
developing the Zen chip design at the heart of
its current processors, she’d turn up in the lab to
review test results. She also made the decision to
move production of her best chips to the facto-
ries of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.,
which exclusively builds chips for other companies
instead of designing and selling its own.
The CEO and her team say they aren’t taking their
momentary advantage for granted, or fooling them-
selves about the challenges ahead—like that other
96.6% of the server-chip market. “Judge me on what
franchise I build five years from now,” Su says. Intel
remains roughly seven times AMD’s market value,
and its server unit alone last year recorded a profit
of $11 billion, close to double AMD’s annual revenue.
Still, Su says that imbalance in resources and reach
is motivating, not overwhelming. “I expect our com-
petition is going to continue to be very formidable,”
she says. “But yeah, I think we’ve earned a seat at
that table.”�Ian KingTHE BOTTOM LINE AMD isn’t going to unseat Intel in the server-
chip business anytime soon, but Intel’s stumbles and CEO Su’s
steady hand have made it a credible alternative for big customers.When Midwest
Startups Sell,
Their Hometowns
Often Lose
City officials in Columbus, Ohio, could hardly
believe their luck. In less than a decade, $850,000
worth of state dollars for local startup CoverMyMeds
appeared to have paid off many times over. Drug dis-
tribution giant McKesson Corp. acquired the com-
pany for $1.3 billion, a state record. At each stage of
development, CoverMyMeds, which makes software
that automates insurance approvals for prescription
drugs and sells it to doctors and pharmacists, had
been nurtured by public money. The deal seemed to
vindicate the local boosters who’d steered millions
of dollars’ worth of public funds into tax incentives
and other support for Ohio’s fledgling startup scene.
That was two years ago. Today, roughly 1,000
of Columbus’s 4,300 public schoolteachers are
spending part of their summer vacation near
CoverMyMeds’ downtown headquarters, protest-
ing the property tax abatements that followed.
Since McKesson acquired CoverMyMeds in 2017, it’s● Cities keep handing local companies tax incentives
even after they’ve cashed in, shortchanging schools