Two of the industry’s biggest chip maker heads share the honor with Elon Musk and Sergey Brin, extending a semiconductor lineage that runs back to Bardeen, Kilby and Noyce.
President Donald Trump presented the National Medal of Science to four technology leaders: AMD CEO Lisa Su, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, SpaceX and Tesla chief Elon Musk, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The medals were handed out at the Science: A New Golden Age Summit.
Michael Dell (Dell Technologies) and Satya Nadella (Microsoft) received the separate National Medal of Technology and Innovation at the same event. Reports said it was the first time Trump has presented either medal, in either of his terms, and that five of the six honorees were born outside the United States.
What the citations recognize
According to Su, her citation recognizes advances in processor architecture and chiplet integration, including the work that powered Frontier, the world’s first exascale supercomputer.
Musk was cited for engineering achievements of extraordinary ambition and scale across space exploration, intelligent systems and communications, and for helping open a new chapter in American manufacturing. Brin was cited for foundational algorithms for information retrieval and data processing. Huang is recognized as the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia; his citation text was not available at the time of writing.
Su: the medal belongs to the team
In a LinkedIn post after the ceremony, Su said her parents came to America with a deep belief in education and hard work, and that the country let her pursue her passion for semiconductors. She credited her team directly: “This recognition really belongs to all AMD’ers.”
She also recalled that her first memory of a National Medal was seeing one in Bob Dennard’s office when she joined IBM, citing his pioneering work on DRAM and transistor scaling. Su noted that in high-performance computing, companies make big technology bets years in advance without knowing how they will turn out.
October 8 also marked 12 years since she became AMD’s CEO. “Leading AMD is my dream job,” she wrote.
About the medal
Congress established the National Medal of Science in 1959, and the National Science Foundation administers it. It was first awarded in 1963, for 1962, to aerospace pioneer Theodore von Kármán. It covers behavioral and social sciences, biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and physics. The National Medal of Technology and Innovation is a separate award, created by Congress in 1980 and administered by the Patent and Trademark Office.
Ceremonies have been irregular. The last Obama-era ceremony was in May 2016, and Trump conferred none in his first term. President Biden presented medals in October 2023 and on January 3, 2025.
Why chips matter to US science
Semiconductors underpin computing, communications and AI, and the American chip story has two halves. One is laboratory discovery: the transistor, the integrated circuit and the physics of how semiconductors behave. The other is company-building: firms that turned those discoveries into industries. Earlier Medal of Science winners come from both halves, and the 2026 awards add two leaders of the companies that design today’s advanced processors.
Semiconductor figures honored earlier
Year Recipient Connection to semiconductors
1965 John Bardeen Co-inventor of the transistor.
1969 Jack Kilby Cited for contributions to the production and application of integrated circuits; built the first IC at Texas Instruments.
1975 Frederick Terman Stanford engineer widely regarded as a father of Silicon Valley.
1979 Robert Noyce Co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor (1957) and Intel (1968) and realized the silicon integrated circuit.
1990 Nick Holonyak Jr. Inventor of the first practical visible-light LED.
1993 Alfred Cho Developed molecular beam epitaxy, used to grow precise semiconductor layers.
2001 Marvin Cohen Theoretical physicist who explained the electronic properties of semiconductors and other solids.
2009 Esther Conwell Pioneer of semiconductor research on how electrons move through materials; medal presented in 2010.
2009 Amnon Yariv Caltech engineer known for semiconductor lasers and optoelectronics.
Arnold Beckman (1989), a scientist-entrepreneur, funded William Shockley’s semiconductor laboratory, from which Fairchild emerged. Some chip icons, such as Carver Mead, received the Technology and Innovation medal instead. Shockley himself does not appear on the Medal of Science list.
Sources
Lisa Su on LinkedIn
Wikipedia: National Medal of Science and list of laureates
Jack Kilby, Robert Noyce, Esther Conwell (University of Rochester), Fairchild history (Computer History Museum)
