Intel Data Center Group Chief Bryant One of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women

Fortune has included Diane Bryant, who leads Intel’s data center business unit, one of the chipmaker’s strongest segments, in this year’s edition of its Most Powerful Women list. This is the first time Bryant’s name has appeared on the list of 51 women, which also includes IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, HP CEO Meg Whitman, Oracle Co-CEO Safra Catz, and the pop singer Taylor Swift.

The Intel Data Center Group has been growing revenue faster than any other unit. Its 2014 revenue was $14.4 billion – up 18 percent year over year. Bryant has been Intel senior VP and the group’s general manager since early 2012. She has worked at Intel since 1985, the same year she graduated from University of California at Davis with a bachelor’s in electrical engineering.

Her group makes processors and other components for servers, workstations, networking, and storage hardware. In recent years it has been making custom processors for some of the world’s largest data center operators – companies like Amazon and Oracle. One of the group’s biggest recent bets has been on FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). Earlier this year Intel paid $16.7 billion to acquire FPGA vendor Altera. In combination with server CPUs, FPGAs can make servers reconfigurable based on application needs.

Ranked 43^rd, Bryant is one of 11 female executives who are new to Fortune’s latest MPW list and the only tech executive among the newcomers.