CEO Lisa Su says AMD is recruiting more AI-focused talent, not fewer workers

AMD CEO Lisa Su has said that AI is not cutting jobs at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), adding that hiring is still rising and the company is adding staff across teams.

Speaking Tuesday at CES in Las Vegas, Lisa said that AMD is not slowing recruitment. “We’re actually not hiring fewer people,” Lisa said. “We’re growing very significantly as a company, so we are hiring lots of people, but we’re hiring different people. We’re hiring people who are AI forward.” She spoke while the company continues to scale production of chips tied to AI systems.

AMD builds graphics processing units used to train AI models and run large workloads. That puts the company in direct competition with Nvidia, which controls more than 90% of the AI chip market by some estimates. The rise of AI followed the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT roughly three years ago. Since then, concerns about job losses have grown across the tech sector and beyond.

AMD hires AI-focused workers while expanding chip output

Lisa said AI is now built into how AMD designs, tests, and manufactures chips. She said job candidates who fully use AI tools are getting priority during hiring. “The people who truly embrace it are the ones getting hired,” Lisa said. She added that AI tools are used across engineering and production work as the company pushes out more products.

Lisa’s comments came one day after Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari said AI is pushing large companies to slow hiring. He said the labor market could see low hiring and low firing continue for some time. AMD’s data points in a different direction.

Right now, AMD has 28,000 employees worldwide, according to a filing with the SEC in December. Lisa said AI adds speed to internal work instead of removing jobs. “AI is augmenting our capabilities,” Lisa said. “It’s not replacing people. It’s increasing productivity and how many products we can bring up at the same time.”

That hiring strategy runs alongside rising demand for AI hardware. Data centers need powerful processors and massive memory capacity. AMD’s GPUs are part of that demand cycle as cloud providers spend billions to expand AI infrastructure.

Memory chip prices rise as AI data centers expand

Semiconductor stocks climbed at the start of the year, led by memory chipmakers tied to AI demand. South Korea’s SK Hynix is up 11.5% year to date. Samsung Electronics has gained 15.9%. Micron is higher by 16.3%.

Memory is extremely important for AI systems built by Nvidia and AMD. Training and running large models require large amounts of fast memory. As spending on AI data centers increases, supply remains tight.

Dynamic random-access memory used in AI servers saw a sharp price jump in 2025. Prices are expected to rise another 40% through the second quarter of 2026, according to Counterpoint Research. High-bandwidth memory remains a key pressure point as demand continues to outpace supply.

“The recent rally across semiconductors has been driven largely by memory rather than logic chips,” said Ben Barringer, head of technology research at Quilter Cheviot. He said strong AI workloads and limited supply are pushing prices higher.

That setup favors memory makers heading into earnings season. Samsung is expected to report a 140% jump in fourth-quarter operating profit based on LSEG estimates. Micron’s earnings per share are forecast to rise more than 400% year-over-year in the December quarter.

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