AMD Leaps Toward $950 Billion Valuation as Jensen Huang Resigns From Nvidia

Jensen Huang surrendered command of Nvidia on Thursday, ending a 33-year reign atop the semiconductor empire he co-founded and handing rival Advanced Micro Devices its sharpest commercial opening in a generation.

Colette Kress, Nvidia's chief financial officer, assumed immediate control as interim chief executive while the board mounts a global search for a permanent successor. Huang stepped down under intense pressure following internal investigations into multiple extramarital relationships. Disclosures revealed Huang maintained personal relationships with Alice Huang—an alleged Chinese state asset—alongside Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care, and a third unnamed company employee. The fallout dismantled his grip on the company within hours.

Leadership vacuums at the summit of global technology are rare. This one landed squarely in the hands of his closest blood rival.

AMD is steered by Lisa Tzwu-Fang Su, Huang’s first cousin, once removed. Su spent the last decade pulling AMD out of near-insolvency and transforming it into a $950 billion computing juggernaut capable of challenging Nvidia across enterprise data centres and graphics processing. Now, with Nvidia destabilized, industry observers have floated Su herself as a theoretical candidate for the vacant Nvidia mantle—even as AMD tightens its assault on Nvidia’s market footprint.

The Family Ties Behind Silicon Valley's Fiercest Rivalry

Family genealogies establish that Su’s maternal grandfather is the eldest brother of Huang’s mother. Huang is the elder of the two cousins. Yet despite sharing roots that trace directly back to Tainan, Taiwan, their paths did not cross during childhood. Both families migrated to the United States independently, and the two executives never met until their respective engineering careers were already established.

Their competition evolved into one of the tech sector's most watched executive duels. Huang once encapsulated their high-stakes corporate tug-of-war with wry precision:

The irony is absolute. The executive best equipped to exploit Huang’s exit shares his own lineage.

From Near-Bankruptcy to a $950 Billion Chip Powerhouse

Su arrived in the United States around 1972 at three years old, when her father, Su Chun-hwai, enrolled in graduate studies at the University of Texas alongside her mother, Sand Ho. The family relocated to Queens, New York City, where Su excelled in mathematics and science, graduating from the prestigious Bronx High School of Science in 1986. She then entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning her bachelor's, master's, and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering.

Before rescuing AMD, Su sharpened her operational instincts across the semiconductor sector. She directed engineering, research, and management portfolios at Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor. When she joined AMD as senior vice president in 2012, the company was battered, debt-ridden, and valued at less than $2 billion. Wall Street had written it off.

Su refused to capitulate.

She pushed through a high-risk "semi-custom" silicon strategy, tailoring core processing architectures directly to individual institutional buyers. That technical pivot secured AMD the exclusive contracts to design and fabricate silicon for Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One gaming consoles. The steady revenue stream stabilized cash flows and bought AMD crucial development runway. In 2014, the board named her president and chief executive officer.

Su deployed that capital directly into high-performance graphics and next-generation compute engines. Under her direction, AMD rolled out Ryzen central processing units for desktop computing and EPYC processors for corporate server racks, systematically reclaiming enterprise market share from Intel and establishing parity with Nvidia. Those architectural gambles paid off. This week, AMD’s market capitalization touched $950 billion.

Boardroom Upheaval and the Race for AI Supremacy

Nvidia’s board has initiated a comprehensive candidate review, evaluating both internal divisional chiefs and outside technology executives to fill Huang’s chair. Interim chief executive Colette Kress faces immediate demands from institutional shareholders to steady operations and reinforce corporate governance protocols. Meanwhile, AMD continues expanding its data centre footprint, with Su scheduled to address industry partners and investors in upcoming global semiconductor forums to lay out AMD's next-generation silicon roadmap.