Ruiz Flies High at AMD

Hector Ruiz ’73 is president and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a global supplier of semiconductors, a Fortune 500 company, and Intel’s chief rival in a brutally competitive industry.

So what’s it like to go to work and sit at the helm of AMD every day? “It’s a lot like flying an airplane,” says Ruiz with a laugh. “Ninety-five percent of the time, it’s fairly routine, but five percent of it can be sheer terror.”

The routine part, he explains, is keeping an eye on the books and handling day-to-day business matters. The scary part is “the realization that you’re responsible for the livelihood of 13,000 employees and that the decisions you make will affect not only the investors but the many communities where we build our products.”

“ Still,” he adds, “we’re creating technologies that make life better for us all. So it’s an exciting industry to be in. I love the job.” AMD’s processors power everything from mobile PCs to new generations of servers, and the company’s flash memory is critical to many of today’s cell phones, pagers, and automotive control systems.

Ruiz has reached the pinnacle of his profession. But in his climb to the top, he had to make an astonishing journey from the Mexican border town of Piedras Negras, where he grew up poor, his father a ranch worker, his mother a secretary. Ruiz’s early ambition: to be an auto mechanic. At age 15, fortune smiled on him, and he met a missionary, Olive Givin, who taught him English in exchange for housework. She also encouraged Ruiz to attend high school, which he did by walking 45 minutes each way daily across the border to Eagle Pass. He excelled in school, and by the time he graduated, he was named valedictorian of his senior class.

As if she hadn’t done enough, Givin paid for Ruiz’s first year at the University of Texas, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering. Ruiz then pursued a doctorate in electrical engineering at Rice. Forever grateful to the missionary, he dedicated his dissertation to her.

Ruiz’s experience at Rice was a happy one. The teachers and students felt like a family, and his sense of self-worth flourished. From the school’s strong honor system, he learned the value of trust. “If you trust people,” he asserts, “you get a lot more than you might expect.”

After he graduated in 1973, Ruiz went to Texas Instruments in Dallas, where he worked for five years in research laboratories and manufacturing operations. In 1977, he joined Motorola as an operations manager in a semiconductor facility in East Kilbride, Scotland. He quickly rose through the ranks and became president of the worldwide Semiconductor Products Sector. While engineering a landmark technology-sharing agreement with AMD, Ruiz met the company’s founder, W. J. Sanders III. Impressed with his technical savvy and leadership qualities, Sanders handpicked Ruiz as his company’s new president and heir apparent in January 2000. Ruiz lives in Austin and commutes regularly to company headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. AMD has about 25 engineers from Rice, and “they’re all pretty outstanding employees,” he says.

Ruiz stays in touch with Rice faculty and speaks periodically at the university. He enjoys being a role model for Hispanic students, and he applauds Rice’s efforts to reach out beyond the hedges. “I would like to see Rice reach out even more and let people know what a great place it is,” Ruiz comments. “It’s still a well-kept secret.” He thinks Rice has the potential of fulfilling a role very much like Stanford’s in spawning new high-tech business ventures. “Stanford is filled with faculty who think that new ventures are good for students, good for the school, and good for the country,” says the AMD president. “Rice might need a little more of that attitude.”