AMD CEO Lisa Su has pushed back against the tech industry’s escalating pay packages for artificial intelligence talent, arguing that while money matters, mission and purpose remain the most powerful recruitment tools.
In an interview with Wired published Tuesday, Su was asked about Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s strategy of offering lavish compensation to attract AI researchers, sometimes running into the hundreds of millions of dollars. While acknowledging the fierce competition for top minds, the 55-year-old executive dismissed the idea of billion-dollar offers ever coming from AMD.
“I think competition for talent is fierce. I am a believer, though, that money is important, but frankly, it’s not necessarily the most important thing when you’re attracting talent,” she said. “It’s important to be in the ZIP code of those numbers, but then it’s super-important to have people who really believe in the mission of what you’re trying to do.”
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A High-Stakes Recruitment Battlefield
The AI talent war has intensified over the past two years, with major players like Meta, Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI offering multimillion-dollar salaries and massive signing bonuses to secure scarce expertise in machine learning, generative AI, and semiconductor design. Meta has reportedly offered some candidates $100 million to jump ship — a figure OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly described as “crazy” in a June podcast.
The poaching attempts have become so aggressive that some engineers report receiving job pitches within hours of announcing roles at rival companies. AI engineer Yangshun Tay, based in Singapore, told Business Insider that he received an email from Meta almost immediately after posting his OpenAI job offer on LinkedIn, asking if he would consider joining them instead.
Altman, like Su, has questioned whether such huge sums create the right workplace culture.
“The strategy of a ton of upfront guaranteed comp and that being the reason you tell someone to join, like really the degree to which they’re focusing on that and not the work and not the mission, I don’t think that’s going to set up a great culture,” he said on the June podcast.
AMD’s Position in the AI Race
Su’s stance comes at a critical time for AMD, which is racing to challenge Nvidia’s dominance in the AI chip market. The company’s latest AI accelerators, the MI300 series, are aimed squarely at powering large-scale AI models — a field that has seen explosive investment since OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched in late 2022. While AMD has historically competed with Intel and Nvidia in CPUs and GPUs, the surge in demand for AI-specific processors has pushed recruitment of elite chip engineers and AI scientists to the top of its priorities.
Culture vs. Compensation
Industry analysts say Su’s comments highlight a philosophical divide in Silicon Valley and beyond: whether the most groundbreaking work emerges from mission-driven teams or from talent lured by extraordinary pay. While there is no denying the influence of competitive salaries, Su’s emphasis on purpose mirrors a sentiment among some executives that innovation and loyalty come from those who buy into the company’s vision — not just its payroll.
With AI reshaping the semiconductor industry and demand for specialized talent outstripping supply, the question remains whether Su’s approach can hold the line against competitors willing to write nine-figure checks.