After earning three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she worked at Texas Instruments, IBM, and Freescale Semiconductor in engineering and management positions.

Recognized with a number of awards and accolades,[2][11] Su was named Executive of the Year by EE Times in 2014[11] and one of the World's Greatest Leaders in 2017 by Fortune.

[2] When she was 10, she began taking apart and then fixing her brother's remote control cars,[18] and she owned her first computer in junior high school, an Apple II.

[6] Su began attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the fall of 1986, intending to major in either electrical engineering or computer science.

[17] In June 1994, Su became a member of the technical staff at Texas Instruments,[22] working in the company's Semiconductor Process and Device Center (SPDC)[11] until February 1995.

[7] Working with various IBM design teams on the details of the device, Su explained, "my specialty was not in copper, but I migrated to where the problems were".

[6] As head and founder of IBM's Emerging Products division, Su ran an internal startup and hired ten employees to focus on biochips and "low-power and broadband semiconductors".

Ken Kutaragi charged the collaboration with "improving the performance of game machine processors by a factor of 1,000", and Su's team eventually came up with the idea for a nine-processor chip, which later became the Cell microprocessor used to power devices such as the Sony PlayStation 3.

[22] Su joined Freescale Semiconductor in June 2007[22][25] as chief technology officer (CTO), heading the company's research and development[5][11] until August 2009.

[22] From September 2008 until December 2011,[22] she was senior vice president and general manager of Freescale's networking and multimedia group, and was responsible for global strategy, marketing, and engineering for the company's embedded communications and applications processor business.

[11] Over the next two years she "played a prominent role"[25] in pushing the company to diversify beyond the PC market, including working with Microsoft and Sony to place AMD chips in Xbox One and PS4 game consoles.

[2] By February 2015, roughly 40 percent of AMD's sales came from non-PC markets, such as video game consoles and embedded devices.

In May 2015, Su and other AMD executives presented a long-term strategy for the company to focus on developing high-performance computing and graphics technologies for three growth areas: gaming, datacenter, and "immersive platforms" markets.

[32][33][34][35][36] Su is the first woman ever to top the Associated Press’s annual survey of CEO compensation, with her 2019 pay package being valued at $58.5 million.

[37] In February 2022, Su became Chair of AMD after completing a reported $49 billion acquisition of FPGA and programmable systems on chip maker Xilinx.

In 2002 she was selected as one of the "Top 100 Young Innovators" by MIT Technology Review,[7][41] and the following year the YWCA gave her an award for outstanding achievement in business.

[11] In 2015, SFGate nominated her for their inaugural Visionary of the Year award, which "salutes leaders who strive to make the world a better place and drive social and economic change by employing new, innovative business models and practices".

[43] In 2017, Su was named "People to Watch" by HPCWire, "Top Ranked Semiconductor CEO", by Institutional Investor Magazine and "World's Greatest Leaders" by Fortune.

[62] Su was subsequently awarded the IEEE Robert N. Noyce Medal, becoming the first woman to receive this prize,[63] and named as #49 on the Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women, credited for the 25-fold increase to AMD's stock since she became CEO in 2014.

[64] In 2022 Su was awarded the International Peace Honors Honoree "for her achievements in revolutionizing high performance computing, the donation of supercomputing power for infectious disease research, and inspiring people from all backgrounds to pursue careers in STEM".