- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks to AMD’s Lisa Su and Enrique Lores of HP.
- The big story: Trump takes Putin’s side, again; Gaza ceasefire crumbles.
- The markets: Mostly up.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. AMD’s Lisa Su and Enrique Lores of HP met more than a dozen years ago, before either was CEO of their respective companies. When I had an opportunity to talk to them together this past weekend during the F1 United States Grand Prix in Austin, I asked what qualities they first saw in each other that stood out and cemented their partnership. Lores pointed to Su’s clarity of vision while Su told me that she appreciated Lores’s willingness to take a bold bet on a then-struggling semiconductor company with a ho-hum product line that was losing ground to competitors like Intel and Nvidia.
“We had used AMD only for the low end of our consumer business and we jointly saw an opportunity to use their technology in more premium products for commercial customers,” said Lores, who notes that he became convinced after seeing what was in the pipeline. “We both had to convince our CEOs that this made sense and develop the economics to show that it made sense.”
As CEOs, they went on to transform their companies and double down on their collaboration, with AMD now supplying the high-performance chips at the heart of HP’s AI-driven PCs, laptops, and workstations. Under Su, AMD has become a powerhouse in the AI revolution and a case study in reinvention. Lores, meanwhile, has been transforming HP from a hardware business to what he calls an “experience solutions company” that brings AI capabilities from the cloud to the device.
The challenge for HP these days is getting customers and software companies to buy into the value proposition at a time when a lot of enterprise dollars continue to flow into investing in large language models. While Lores has revived HP’s fortunes since becoming CEO in 2019 and continues to grow PC sales, concerns about tariffs and weakness in the printing business have cut 15% from the stock price this year. AMD stock has almost doubled.
But that doesn’t change the strength of a partnership that both say is built on mutual trust, as well as bottom-line results, as they co-develop new technologies and a new AI architecture for the workplace. Said Lores: “When you have a friend, you trust your friend, and when you are doing new things, it’s important to have that level of confidence. When you go through problems, which also happens, it’s also good to try to have trust in the other side.”
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
