Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

AMD was founded on May 1, 1969 by Jerry Sanders and seven colleagues who had all left Fairchild Semiconductor — the legendary Silicon Valley company that had spawned Intel just a year earlier. Sanders, a former actor and salesman, had been passed over for the top job at Fairchild. He started AMD with $100,000 in seed capital and a philosophy that "people first, products and profits will follow."

IBM's decision to use Intel's 8086 processor in the original PC came with a condition: Intel had to license the design to a second manufacturer for supply security. Intel chose AMD. This "second source" agreement gave AMD the right to manufacture Intel-compatible chips and launched AMD as a serious competitor. The deal expired in 1986, beginning decades of legal disputes between AMD and Intel over who owned what.

AMD launched the Athlon 64 in 2003 — a chip that was genuinely faster than Intel's competing products. For three years, AMD outsold Intel in key markets. Flush with success, AMD acquired graphics chip maker ATI for $5.4 billion in 2006 — a deal that nearly destroyed the company. The acquisition was poorly integrated, AMD's debt soared, and Intel responded with the Core architecture that recaptured the performance crown.

By 2014, AMD was burning through cash, had lost its performance advantage, and was rumoured to be on the verge of bankruptcy. The board appointed Lisa Su as CEO in October 2014. Su, a MIT-trained engineer, refocused AMD on data centres and gaming, cancelled projects that weren't working, and bet the company on a new chip architecture called Zen. She described her first years as CEO as "fixing the foundation before building the house."

AMD's Zen architecture, launched in 2017, was the first AMD processor in over a decade to genuinely compete with Intel. By 2022, AMD's EPYC server chips were outperforming Intel's competing products and winning contracts at Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. AMD's stock rose over 3,000% from its 2015 low to its 2021 peak under Su's leadership. The company that had been weeks from bankruptcy became a $200 billion semiconductor giant.