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Corporate earnings season brings another reminder of the enormous benefits the U.S. enjoys by being the world’s talent magnet. Yes, Americans want violent illegal migrants expelled, and the president deserves great credit for restoring law and order at U.S. borders. It’s also vital that we continue to welcome law-abiding geniuses, potential geniuses, and even nongeniuses who show up with drive and a dream. Thank goodness the world’s most valuable publicly traded corporation is based in the U.S. and that its American CEO and founder, Jensen Huang, came here as a child from Taiwan. The semiconductor company he built, Nvidia, is at the heart of U.S. technological
supremacy and this week announced another blowout quarter of rocketing sales and profits. And who runs the second greatest U.S. semiconductor company? Another hardworking American, also born in Taiwan and brought here as a child, who just happens to be a distant relative of Mr. Huang. Today the Journal’s Robbie Whelan and Amrith Ramkumar report from Austin on the woman who made a Texas-sized bet on the world’s technological future: At a board meeting in late 2022, Lisa Su, chief executive of chip designer
Advanced Micro Devices announced that she was radically changing course. “I’m going to pivot the entire company,” she told the directors gathered around a boardroom table at the company’s Austin campus. The rise of artificial intelligence was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she said, and the company had to put AI at the center of its entire product line. Three years later, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has nearly quadrupled in size, its market value rising from $90 billion to more than $335 billion despite a recent pullback. AMD’s strategy of positioning itself
at the center of the global AI race has paid off handsomely, making Su into a billionaire and her company into one of the only viable designers of the powerful chips needed to power advanced AI models.
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