AMD CEO Lisa Su Says Concerns About an AI Bubble Are Overblown

Earlier this year, WIRED said that AMD CEO Lisa Su was “out for Nvidia’s blood.” The American chipmaker is inactive tiny compared to the juggernaut that is Nvidia—their marketplace caps are $353 cardinal and $4.4 trillion, respectively—but Su’s institution is gaining steam. Today, erstwhile Su took the signifier astatine WIRED’s Big Interview league successful San Francisco, she had thing other successful her sights: the AI bubble.

When asked by WIRED elder writer Lauren Goode if the tech manufacture is successful an AI bubble, her effect was “emphatically, from my perspective, no.” The AI manufacture is going to request scores of chips from companies similar AMD, and fears of specified a bubble, Su said, are “somewhat overstated.”

That mightiness dependable bold, but boldness is Su’s full deal. Since she became AMD’s CEO successful 2014, she has accrued the company’s marketplace headdress from $2 cardinal to $300 billion. Now, Su is betting large connected the request for overmuch much computing powerfulness for AI, and the information centers needed to supply that.

Still, determination are plentifulness of hurdles up for AMD. One is each of those information centers being built, and different is getting its chips retired into the hands of arsenic galore customers arsenic possible. During the discussion, Goode asked the AMD CEO astir selling chips to China. She confirmed that AMD volition wage a 15 percent taxation instituted by the Trump medication connected MI308 chips it plans to resume shipping to China. The US authorities antecedently halted income of the chips to China, but past began reviewing applications again implicit the summer. AMD said earlier this twelvemonth that US export restrictions connected the MI308 chips would outgo the institution astir $800 million.

Earlier this year, AMD made a immense woody with OpenAI, nether which the AI institution volition deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD’s Instinct GPUs implicit the people of respective years. As portion of the deal, AMD agreed to let OpenAI to bargain 160 cardinal shares of the company’s banal for a penny per share. efficaciously giving it a 10 percent involvement successful the company. The archetypal gigawatt deployment is acceptable to rollout successful the 2nd fractional of adjacent year.

It’s 1 of respective large bets AMD is making connected AI information centers to powerfulness artificial intelligence. What Su said she’s not disquieted astir is contention from Nvidia, oregon adjacent Google oregon Amazon, some of which person their ain chip-making plans. “When I look astatine the landscape, what keeps maine up astatine nighttime is ‘How bash we determination faster erstwhile it comes to innovation?’” Su said.

Su believes that AI is inactive successful its infancy and her institution needs to beryllium acceptable to supply chips for the future. “As bully arsenic the models are today,” she says, “the adjacent 1 volition beryllium better.” There’s immense imaginable successful AI, and “there’s not a crushed not to support pushing that technology” into the future.