It was October 2014. AMD was dying a slow, painful death.

The company had just laid off another quarter of its workforce. Its stock price hovered around $3. With $2.2 billion in debt and losses mounting for four straight years, AMD had been forced to sell its own headquarters just to keep the lights on. They leased it back because they still needed somewhere to work.

In the server market - where the real money was made - AMD commanded less than 1% market share. Intel owned everything else.

This was the company Lisa Su inherited when she became CEO. And in her first meeting with the board, she proposed something that made them wonder if she'd lost her mind.

"We're going to compete directly with Intel in high-performance computing," she announced.

The room went silent. For decades, AMD had survived by being the cheap alternative. The knock-off brand. The processor you bought when you couldn't afford Intel. Now their new CEO wanted to go toe-to-toe with a company ten times their size?

"Lisa, we love AMD, but I can't trust what you say," Forrest Norrod, then at Dell, told her bluntly when she pitched him on AMD's new direction. The entire industry had the same reaction. AMD had burned them too many times with broken promises and failed products.

What followed was perhaps the gutsiest corporate turnaround in tech history. While Intel counted its profits, Su and her team worked around the clock on a radical new chip architecture called Zen. She preached her "5% rule" - just be 5% better each quarter. It sounded modest, but it kept her engineers from being paralyzed by the seemingly impossible task ahead.

For three agonizing years, nothing changed. The losses continued. The stock price stayed flat. Industry analysts called AMD "uninvestable." One particularly harsh review suggested the company should just give up and sell itself for parts.

But Su had noticed something others hadn't. Intel had grown complacent, milking the same basic chip designs for years while raising prices. There was an opening - if AMD could build something genuinely better, not just cheaper.

In 2017, AMD launched Ryzen, their first Zen-based processor.

The reviews were stunning. For the first time in over a decade, AMD had built a chip that didn't just compete with Intel - it beat them. Better performance. Better price. Better efficiency.

What happened next rewrote the rules of Silicon Valley. AMD's server market share rocketed from 1% to over 25%. The stock price soared from $3 to over $200. In 2022, the unthinkable happened: AMD surpassed Intel in market value. The student had become the master.

Su became the first woman ever to top the Associated Press's annual CEO compensation survey. More importantly, she proved that even in tech's most capital-intensive industry, David could still beat Goliath - if David was willing to endure years of pain for a shot at victory.

Today, AMD's chips power everything from PlayStation 5 consoles to the world's fastest supercomputers. The company that was once 30 days from bankruptcy is now worth more than Intel and competing directly with Nvidia in the AI gold rush.

When asked about those dark early years, Su often returns to a simple philosophy she learned as a child. Her immigrant parents made her memorize ten random English words from the dictionary every single day. It taught her that massive challenges could be conquered through small, daily improvements.