Semiconductor giant AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) representatives recently reported that demand for the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT graphics cards, which went on sale in March 2025, has been “truly unprecedented.” Now, the company has set the task of restoring supplies of these products at the recommended retail price as its “number one priority.”
The manufacturer’s suggested retail price for the graphics cards is USD 599 for the AMD Radeon 9070 XT and USD 549 for the Radeon 9070. However, as the products hit the Japanese market, their cost reached USD 859.
“During the presentation of the graphics cards, AMD promised wide availability of the new products, but high specifications and performance, combined with an attractive price, significantly increased demand. This led to extremely high demand for the graphics cards,” stated AMD Corporate Vice President David McAfee during a broadcast on HotHardware.
The senior official also added that AMD is doing everything it can to ensure that customers can purchase graphics cards at the recommended price, while noting the efforts of the company’s retailers and partners to ensure that the supply chain remains uninterrupted.
Now, talking about the USD 210 billion semiconductor company, has a demanding work culture that has been fostered by Lisa Su, its CEO. Dr. Lisa Su reportedly conducts meetings on the weekends and regularly communicates with staff members late at night, anticipating answers even after midnight, according to CNBC. She feels that her team is inspired to push boundaries by the company’s ambitious goals, which are the driving force behind this demanding schedule. Notably, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, is a cousin of the 55-year-old.
Dr. Lisa Su’s leadership and revolutionary influence on AMD’s market success have earned her the title of Time’s CEO of the Year 2024. She took up the role in 2014, and since then, the company’s stock price has increased nearly 50 times. Under her leadership, AMD has become a powerful force in the market, securing its place next to industry titans Nvidia and Intel in terms of market capitalisation.
Patrick Moorhead, a tech industry analyst and former AMD executive, says Dr. Su’s leadership style is defined by a results-driven approach and high expectations. Su’s strict management style can be difficult for certain employees, according to Mr. Moorhead, who left AMD before Su’s arrival, and those who break their promises frequently find it difficult to succeed there.
When her staff members receive lengthy documents at midnight, the CEO frequently expects them to discuss their complexities during morning calls. As soon as the prototype chips are delivered from the factory, she personally inspects them, demonstrating her famous attention to detail.
More Details About Lisa Su
Lisa Su was born in Taiwan and moved to the United States with her parents. Her father studied mathematics for his graduate degree in New York. Her father’s intense dinner table quizzes exposed her to mathematics at a young age, setting the groundwork for her subsequent academic endeavours. Her original goals, though, were different. She eventually realised her talents were elsewhere, but as a teenager, she dreamt of becoming a concert pianist.
Dr. Su’s outstanding academic performance brought her to the esteemed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she graduated with electrical engineering bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. With stints at Texas Instruments and IBM in the 1990s, her stellar educational background helped pave the way for a prosperous career in the tech sector.
While pursuing her PhD, Su became one of the first engineers to look into the SOI (Silicon on Insulator) technology to increase transistors’ efficiency by building them atop layers of insulating material.
At the beginning of her career, Su worked in the Semiconductor Process and Device Centre (SPDC) at Texas Instruments, before being hired by IBM as a research staff member specialising in device physics. As an active member of IBM’s R&D, Su worked on copper technology, which was later launched in 1998. This innovation increased the productivity of chips by up to 20%.
In 2001, Su was titled “Top Innovator Under 35” by MIT Technology Review for her work with Emerging Products. This included a microprocessor that improved battery life in phones and other handheld devices. IBM then collaborated with Sony and Toshiba for a nine-processor chip that eventually became a cell microprocessor used in PlayStation 3.
Dr. Su became the first female CEO of AMD since its founding in 1969, just two years after joining the company as a senior vice president and general manager in 2012. AMD’s recent success has been greatly aided by Dr. Su’s technical expertise, as she is one of the few Fortune 500 CEOs with a PhD. Her experience as an engineer has allowed her to lead creative initiatives, such as the creation of faster CPU chips for computers.
The AMD boss has also published more than 40 technical articles, apart from winning multiple honours for her semiconductor industry leadership. She was named one of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Technology” by the National Diversity Council in 2016 and 2017. Su ranked 49th in Forbes’ list of “World’s 100 Most Powerful Women,” followed by 12th on Fortune’s list of Most Powerful Women in 2023. She was also included in Time Magazine’s 2024 list of the “100 Most Influential People in AI.”
AMD To Go For AI Hardware Leadership
In October 2024, during a keynote at the company’s “Advancing AI” event in San Francisco, Su said AMD was focusing on offering powerful hardware and co-innovating with a variety of partners. In what looked like a sneak peek of the company’s roadmap to become an “end-to-end AI leader,” Su outlined AMD’s four core themes.
The first one talked about providing high-performance, energy-efficient compute engines capable of supporting a variety of AI training and inference workloads. Su told the media that there’s a “no one-size-fits-all” approach to computing and that providing CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs capable of providing top-level performance across the board enables AMD to keep up with the competition from rivals like Nvidia.
The second theme was the desire to create and support an open and developer-friendly ecosystem for AI development. The third talked about AMD’s approach to leadership in AI, which would facilitate co-innovation with industry partners.
The final theme was about AMD maintaining its leadership in the AI chip market as a complete solution provider, offering hardware from chip-level to rack, cluster, and data centres. Su further stated that the strategy would help AMD capture a significant share of the rapidly growing AI market, estimated by the CEO to reach USD 500 billion by 2028 for data centre AI accelerators alone.