Lisa Su Wins Yahoo Finance CEO of the Year as AMD Stock Climbs 158%

Lisa Su has been named Yahoo Finance's 2026 CEO of the Year, and the scoreboard makes the case. Advanced Micro Devices shares are up 158% this year, while AI heavyweight Nvidia has slid 7%. Yahoo Finance credited AMD with landing major customers, beating Wall Street's earnings expectations and deepening its push into AI computing gear.

The gap widens further out. Broadcom is down just under 1% this year, against gains of 11% for the S&P 500 and 10% for the Nasdaq Composite. AMD's valuation punched through $1 trillion for the first time in late September before pulling back to roughly $906 billion, caught in the tech selloff that followed the midterm elections.

Su's path to the top job wasn't a straight line. She arrived at AMD as a senior executive in 2012, when the company's finances were shaky enough that its survival drew questions, and took over as CEO in 2014. At Yahoo Finance Invest, she said the pull was the work itself: “The reason I joined AMD was I wanted to be part of a company that really could be at the bleeding edge of technology.”

Acquisitions reshaped the company along the way. Buying Xilinx widened AMD's chip lineup, and this year brought an $8.2 billion deal for World Labs, the AI startup founded in 2024 by Fei-Fei Li, the researcher known as the Godmother of AI and a former chief scientist at Google Cloud. Li is set to become AMD's executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting straight to Su. AMD also has an agreement with Meta that could leave the Facebook parent holding up to 10% of the chipmaker, and Su received the National Medal of Science from President Donald Trump.

The third quarter delivered record sales of $13.38 billion, up 45% from a year earlier and ahead of the $13.06 billion analysts expected. Adjusted earnings hit $2.09 per share, a 74% jump that beat the $1.94 forecast. Data center revenue climbed 97% to $8.5 billion on EPYC server processor demand and the growing rollout of Instinct MI450 AI accelerators, and AMD expects data center sales to rise another 50% quarter over quarter in the final three months of 2026.

For 2027, Su is targeting revenue growth above 80%, with server and data center AI product revenues both doubling. The hardware behind it: MI450 GPUs and sixth-generation EPYC Venice CPUs, which power Helios, AMD's rack-scale system bundling processors, networking and software for training and running models. Microsoft began folding Helios into its Azure AI services in the second half of 2026, and Anthropic aims to buy up to two gigawatts of MI450 GPUs through the platform starting in 2027 — a deal that could be worth tens of billions of dollars. AMD will also invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic under a separate agreement. “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,” Su told Yahoo Finance.